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1/2014

Schulz XXI

CzasKultury/English

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CzasKultury/English 1/2014

Editorial BoardMonika Bakke, Jerzy Borowczyk, Krzysztof Hoffmann, Waldemar Kuligowski, Andrzej Marzec, Lucyna Marzec, Magdalena Radomska, Marek Wasilewski (Editor in Chief)

Executive EditorAgata Rosochacka Scientific CouncilMarek Bartelik, Marek Krajewski, Tomasz Mizerkiewicz Anna Wieczorkiewicz, Agata Jakubowska

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The primary version of articles was published in print in “Czas Kultury” in Polish. Translation of articles into English was financed by the Ministry of Higher Education and Science (Poland) under the National Programme for the Development of Humanities.

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4 The Afterlife of Schulz, or Schulzology: What Is It Good For?

Arkadiusz Kalin

28 Schulz as Post-Humanist. The Prosthetic Principle of Artistic Creation

Agata Rosochacka

54 Figures of Infirmity: People with Disabilities in Bruno Schulz’s Short Stories

Aleksandra Smusz

69 The Father and the Animals. The Problem of Escape in The Cinnamon Shops

Adrian Mrówka

82 Onto-theo-logy According to Bruno Schulz

Łukasz Kołoczek

98 Schulz According to Complicite. Instability, Metamorphosis, and Fluidity

Anna Suwalska-Kołecka

112 Bruno Schulz – Digitally. The Internet Gamebook

Idol and the Future of Schulz Adaptations on the Computer Screen

Mariusz Pisarski

SCHULZ XXI. Table of Contents

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Schulz Yesterday and TodayIt began with Jerzy Ficowski and Artur Sandauer, after whom many other scholars expanded the perspectives of Schulz studies – among others, Jan Błoński discovered Jewish influences on the Drohobych author’s writings, Władysław Panas followed this trail further, presenting the Kabbalistic dimension of Schulz’s work, Włodzimierz Bolecki examined it in terms of poetics, Jerzy Jarzębski created some synthesizing concepts, and Małgorzata Kito-wska-Łysiak discussed his contribution to the visual arts, to selectively mention some of the most prominent names in twentieth century Schulz studies. And there were also efforts to reveal cultural contexts – Surrealist, Modernist, Romantic, psychoanalytical readings, deconstructionist readings, and more. It thus would appear that an interpre-tative canon was quick to form, one that has earned the respect of its successors. The true efflorescence of Schulz

The Afterlife of Schulz, or Schulzology: What Is It Good For? Arkadiusz Kalin

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Arkadiusz Kalin, The Afterlife of Schulz...

studies came, however, with the dawn of the new millen-nium and was particularly notable at two points marking anniversaries: the years 2002 and 2012, when the 110th and 120th anniversaries of Schulz’s birth and the 60th and 70th anniversaries of his death were observed. Over the last decade or so, a few dozen books devoted to Schulz have been published, including studies by scholars outside Poland: these include monographs, popularizing works for a broad audience, encyclopaedic and contextualizing vol-umes, special issues of magazines and, of course, antholo-gies of essays, usually collections resulting from multifar-ious scholarly symposiums on Schulz (often international conferences), as well as individual articles in all sorts of publications.1 During that time, a successor has appeared to take up the biographical research that Ficowski was known for – Wiesław Budzyński, author of three books on Schulz (above all the impressive Schulz pod kluczem [Schulz Under Lock and Key]). Importantly, Schulz’s work and the achievements of Schulz studies are increasingly available in a widely accessible medium– via the Internet. The new millennium has also yielded something incredibly import-ant: an increased familiarity with (if not popularity of) Schulz in his hometown and more broadly in Ukrainian society. The Bruno Schulz Festival that has taken place in Drohobych every two years since 2004 is eminently respon-sible for this development. Its last meeting, in 2012, was exceptional in terms of its richness – the festival, moved from May to the more congenial September because of the

1 The most complete bibliography, though naturally incomplete given the extraordinary wealth and proliferation of scholarly material, is available at the following website: http://brunoschulz.org/biblio-schulz.html.

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FIFA European Championships, lasted over a week, with plays, concerts, readings, and the traditional international session of discussions on Schulz (from which conference volumes are compiled and published each time).2 The festi-val greeted the debut of a new translation of Schulz’s prose by Yuri Andrukhovych, a book which has a real chance of spreading the work’s popularity in Ukraine. Though 2012 was not as widely celebrated in Poland as the previous ma-jor anniversary3 (the only event on a par with the festi-val in Ukraine was the Bruno Schulz Festival in Wrocław that autumn), a large number of publications on Schulz have since come out, as recently as within the past several weeks, that originated then.

Last year also marked another kind of breakthrough year for the popularity of Schulz’s work, since it finally entered the public domain, as the rigorous copyright binding for 70 years after the author’s death came to an end. With that in mind, it is worth mentioning the unconventional form of tribute to that event that is the hypertextual internet game Idol (Bałwochwał), a newly created poetic pastiche of Schulz’s labyrinthine prose. Readers can learn more about this project, created under the aegis of the Ha!art corporation, at the corporation’s web portal (http://www.ha.art.pl/schulz/start.html).4

2 The 2014 edition took place 24–30.05.2014; for more details, see: http://schulzfestpol.blogspot.com.

3 ThoughSchulzlostouttoKorczak,Kraszewski,Skarga,andPrusforofficialrecognitionfrom state cultural authorities, the Sejm refrained from completely shaming itself (in the context of the Ukrainian parliament declaring a Year of Schulz) by making November 2012 the Month of Schulz.

4 A description of the project in Polish can be found at: http://www.ha.art.pl/prezentacje/29-projekty/2817-mariusz-pisarski-marcin-bylak-balwochwal-interaktywna-fikcja-sieciowa-

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I would like to discuss these last publications (unfortu-nately merely signalling toward some of them due to lack of space), looking at how far they develop and modify the main interpretative currents in Schulz studies or postu-late new ones. It is possible to perceive the crystalliza-tion of two phenomena, which are in fact linked to one another. The first is the scholarly status of Schulz stud-ies – studies of the writer’s biography, his work (in lit-erature, criticism, and the visual arts), and its reception extending across several decades, numerous disciplines and many countries. This area of research is so highly de-veloped that for an individual scholar to attempt to grasp the body of existing knowledge in its entirety has become impossible. For that reason, it would be desirable to create scholarly teams and broader initiatives financed in a long-term perspective through research grants (I therefore find the creation of a magazine for Schulz specialists Schulz/Forum to be a highly worthwhile initiative, about which more below). Otherwise, the field faces the dangers of ba-nalization through unconscious repetition of ideas, lack of recognition for important texts (a development which is already occurring, even with entire books by Schulz), and therefore methodological carelessness possibly being used to hide at best overspecialization, at worst simple ignorance. To summarize in a few words, I can cite the title of this essay, Schulzology: What Is It Good For? The other phenomenon relates to the “afterlife” in the title – what is at issue is the Schulz universe becoming a part of popular culture: the author of The Cinnamon Shops, often

na-podstawie-opowiadan-brunona-schulza.html. One of its co-creators, Mariusz Pisarski, writes in greater detail about the undertaking elsewhere in this issue.

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linked with Kafka (also in terms of his iconic recognis-ability), seems to be slowly sharing his fate: an interpre-tative stalemate that results from the need for the writ-er to be made intellectually accessible to a wide group of readers and from the effects of a media career (becoming a celebrity). Schulz has already become a kind of cultural brand, a recognizable literary-artistic image that can also be quite simply milked for cash. And in that sense, one doesn’t know whether to feel joy or sorrow at the fact that 2012 was not declared the Year of Schulz by the Polish Sejm, since it could have meant the writer would meet the pop culture fate of Chopin, who was kitschified in 2010 (Chopin caps, lollipops, gloves, stuffed animals, jewellry, alcohol, chocolates, smart phone apps, hip-hop concerts, restaurant menus and so on and so forth).

A special issue of the magazine Radar has reported on Schulz’s growing popularity worldwide, with Jerzy Jarzębski summing up the concept of Schulzomania and other writers presenting creative and critical work in-spired by the Drohobych master and his work (among oth-ers, J. Andrukhovych, J. Prochaśko, M. Sieniewicz). This publication has the added virtue of being trilingual (it is issued in Polish, German, and Ukrainian) and available via the internet.5

A major event for Schulz devotees in recent years, pro-viding what should be required reading for them, is the creation of a specialized magazine that revolves entirely

5 Radar 6/2012, http://e-radar.pl/images/Magazyny/1356811150_radar6_elektr.pdf [accessed 20.01.2014].

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around Schulz, called Schulz/Forum, published in Gdańsk at the initiative of Stanisław Rosiek. And though the founders of the magazine plan for it to come out as a quar-terly, at the moment it is published annually (the first is-sue came out in 2012, the second a year later). Its volumes, painstakingly and attractively put together, gather to-gether the work of outstanding Schulz specialists as well as younger scholars and valuable archival items, while at the same time registering the afterlife of Schulz – artistic flights of fancy, echoes of his work and documentation of the continually expanding borders of Schulz’s popularity. Schulz is the only twentieth century Polish author who has been honoured with a monographic magazine, and furthermore at such a high level of quality – may the proj-ect long continue.

Of spectral books (thus in the spirit of Schulz, to recall his mythical Messiah [Mesjasz]): we have still to wait for Agata Tuszyńska’s long-anticipated book about Józefina Szelińska, Schulz’s beloved, concealed by biographers for years under the initial “J”6 (though the book may have come out by the time you read this). A collection of let-ters from Szelińska to Jerzy Ficowski served as the inspi-ration for this biographical narrative, though Tuszyńska hopes to be able to uncover at least part of her subject’s many years of correspondence with Schulz – perhaps this is what has kept her from rushing forward to publish her book? Or perhaps Tuszyńska is simply still searching for Schulz’s Mesjasz?

6 SomepassageswerepublishedinthefirstissueofSchulz/Forum.

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As always, though they may be less convincing than in-dividual monographs, conference volumes are precious publications – particularly this year, since 2012 produced relatively scant material. The main event of the Bruno Schulz Festival in Wrocław in autumn was the scholar-ly meeting, which produced the book now (a year later) published, entitled Bruno od Księgi Blasku. Studia i es-eje o twórczości Brunona Schulza7 (Bruno from the Book of Radiance. Studies and Essays on the Works of Bru-no Schulz). The papers collected in this book present a wide spectrum of interpretations and perspectives in Schulz studies, with big names appearing, naturally, next to voices from the younger generation of scholars, much to be valued. What I would like to accentuate fore-most in the context of further studies is the formula in the title – the “Book of Radiance” alludes to a book by Władysław Panas, a monograph released in 1997, which devised a whole new interpretative current for approach-ing Schulz’s work8 (unfortunately the collection lacks an introduction, wherein this choice of title could have been elaborated on). Panas identified the Book of Radiance from Schulz’s story “Wiosna” (Spring) with the mystical, kabbalistic Zohar, and drew an entire interpretation of Schulz’s oeuvre from the kabbala of Isaac Luria, a 16th century Jewish mystic.

7 P. Próchniak (ed.), Bruno od Księgi Blasku. Studia i eseje o twórczości Brunona Schulza, Kraków 2013.

8 See W. Panas, Księga blasku. Traktat o kabale w prozie Brunona Schulza, Lublin 1997.

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Schulz Tangled Up in the KabbalaToward the end of 2012, a book by Michał Paweł Markow-ski came out with the title Powszechna rozwiązłość. Schulz, egzystencja, literatura9 (Universal Dissolution: Schulz, Ex-istence, Literature), an attempt at a philosophical read-ing of Schulz; though generally the level and scope of ac-tivity in Schulz studies in that year was not impressive (perhaps also due to delays in publishing some works) this work stands out as the most important publication in Schulzology released then. In it, Markowski develops his thesis that Schulz’s work is dominated by irony and parody, put forward a few years earlier Polska literatu-ra nowoczesna. Leśmian, Schulz, Witkacy (Polish Modern Literature. Leśmian, Schulz, Witkacy). In his new book, Markowski intends to show an existential Schulz, read philosophically, and largely succeeds in doing so. This represents the first extensive effort to refute Władysław Panas’s thesis, highly influential in Schulz studies, that postulates Schulz’s mysticism inspired by Luria’s kab-balism.10 Schulz read as an ironist and parodist of Jewish tradition is not reconciliable with the image of a solemn mystic, attempting through his prose to restore a lost di-vine order. And that is probably the greatest asset of Mar-kowski’s book, whose other theses are disputable and in need of wide-ranging rebuttal, such as the author’s un-derestimation of Schulz’s ambivalence. I must also con-fess that though some fifteen years have passed since the

9 M.P. Markowski, Powszechna rozwiązłość. Schulz, egzystencja, literatura, Kraków 2012.10 This line is also developed in Panas’s subsequent books; to see how the interpretation has

become practically an obligatory part of explicating Schulz, see Słownik schulzowski, edited byW.Bolecki,J.JarzębskiandS.Rośek,whereitistreatedasobviouslycorrect(firstedition, 2003.)

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publication of Panas’s interpretatively seductive book and a number of works have continued that interpretation, I still do not know what might connect Isaac Luria with Schulz. I don’t understand why a sixteenth century sec-tarian from Palestine would serve as the chief inspiration for a Polonized, secular Jew living in Drohobych, an avid reader of the Polish Romantics, familiar with Goethe and Hoffmann in the original, a Modernist who met Thomas Mann and studied for several years in Vienna (at that time one of the cultural capitals of Europe) and who, as is often forgotten, knew neither Hebrew nor Yiddish! Markowski’s book offers a chance to extract Schulz from this heavily reductive interpretative drawer in which the Drohobych master has been pigeonholed thanks largely to Panas’s flair for writing (his texts are beautifully written), rather than his less impressive critical argumentation.

Birds of a Feather [/ A Friend of Ours]But there have been many attempts to decipher Schulz apart from Panas’s vision – as I mentioned earlier, Schulz studies have particularly thrived in the last fifteen or so years, presenting various perspectives for interpreting both individual works and the entire oeuvre of the author of Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. And now, what lemons they are! Because, in Markowski’s view, writ-ing about Schulz has led to his being entombed in “aca-demic writing” for years. Markowski in his philosophical monograph on Schulz grumbles about the proliferation of marginalia and fragments in the work being done on the writer’s life and output. As I mentioned, Markows-

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ki’s latest book also further develops passages that dealt with Schulz in the scholar’s previous work. At the same time, however, Markowski repeats the critical gesture of his 2004 book on Gombrowicz, Czarny nurt. Gombrowicz, świat, literatura (Black Stream. Gombrowicz, World, Lit-erature). There, he likewise negated all previous work in the field of Gombrowicz studies, finding it to be obsolete, irrelevant, fragmentary, and off the mark in its interpre-tations, and predicting that the only correct interpreta-tion would take the form of an existential-psychoanalyti-cal approach. Naturally any obligation to deal with earlier works is thus removed – when one is not standing on the “shoulders of giants,” one feels oneself to be a giant. This narcissistic critical stance is very much on display in his book on Schulz, because the first part (of four) consists of self-promotion against the background of the Drohobych master. I will merely add that on the publisher’s website, this book was modestly advertised as “the most original book on Schulz that has yet been written.”11 Let us not be deceived by such slogans, though portions of the book are of course highly interesting.

Philosophical Schulz It is true that before Markowski’s book, few endeavoured to interpret Schulz in a philosophical vein– but there were attempts, though sometimes overly reductive ones,

11 See: http://www.wuj.pl/page,produkt,prodid,1945,strona,Powszechna_rozwiazlosc,katid,37.html [accessed 15.03.2016]. The phrase is quoted ironically by Adam Lipszyc in the title of his critical review of Markowski’s book – which I recommend to readers for its penetrating assessmentandvaluableinterpretativepolemic:A.Lipszyc,“NajoryginalniejszaksiążkaoSchulzu,jakądotejporynapisano”,Wielogłos (Polyphony), 1(15)/2013. In the same issue, Markowski replies to the review of his book.

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such as for example Włodzimierz Bolecki’s reading, which designated Nietzscheanism as the sole inspiration for Schulz’s work. Markowski speaks of Schulz the existen-tialist and shows not so much influences as new philo-sophical contexts for interpreting the Drohobych master (in many places, we must admit, controversial and over-burdened by the weight of his criticism), an interpretative effort that emerges as undeniably intriguing.

By way of complementary reading, let us here announce the forthcoming publication of Schulz. Między mitem i filozofią (Schulz. Between Myth and Philosophy, ed. J. Michalik, P. Bursztyka), the product of a conference or-ganized by the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw in collaboration with the Austrian Cultur-al Forum in June 2012. The discussion had the purpose of revealing the author of The Cinnamon Shops through philosophical interpretations – and what is more, formed one of a small number of scholarly celebrations of the Year of Schulz in Poland (besides the autumn conference in Wrocław), moreover organized by philosophers (and philosophy specialists) rather than – as was hitherto the case – by literary scholars. We should expect the publica-tion to offer a number of new and intriguing readings of Schulz, particularly from the perspective of the herme-neutics of ideas.

Political SchulzIn his book, Markowski observes – in keeping with a widely held notion in Schulz studies – that utilitari-

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an interpretations of Schulz’s works are unthinkable, in particular political interpretations (though we do find political undertones in Schulz – in the story “Sanatori-um Under the Sign of the Hourglass” there is the mo-tif of an enemy army and assassins on the city streets, and “Spring” (Wiosna) is a completely blatant anarchis-tic-revolutionary rebellion against the dictatorial rule of Franz Joseph I):

What is worse, Schulz cannot be used for any cause, he cannot be made a patron saint of the left or the right; neither Sierakowski, nor Michnik, nor least of all Wildstein will write an essay worth reading about him or his texts. Schulz is distinctly useless: he serves no cause, he does not fortify or rouse, and even his essays on Piłsudski are disappointing to old veterans of the Polish Legions.12

Nonetheless, in autumn of last year an intriguingly dif-ferent addition to the existing corpus of work on Schulz arrived, with the release of Schulz, a new volume in the series of “guides” published by Krytyka Polityczna, the magazine and political organization. Each of these guides, several dozen of which have come out, focuses on a particular question, issue or figure relevant to contem-porary culture, presenting new interpretations of them from a fixed, consistent political standpoint.13 Among

12 M.P. Markowski, Powszechna rozwiązłość, p. 28.13 The political engagement of the magazine takes a form characteristic of the New Left,

perceivingpoliticsinaFoucaultianwayashiddendiscoursesofpowerthatrevealthemselves in all areas of the life of society– this subject has enjoyed great popularity in recenttimes,witha“politicalturn”evenbeingproclaimedinthecontemporaryhumanities.

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these guides we find such varied problems and issues as drug policy, the economic crisis, the Polish Brethren, TV serials, the work of Wajda or Miłosz – often presented in an innovative and inspiring way. How did the one devot-ed to the Drohobych master turn out? Well, surprisingly apolitical, as the editor and author of the introduction, Jakub Majmurek, even admits. Neither do the other texts included in the guide live up to the promise of the series’ name.14 Let us nonetheless take a closer look at this pub-lication, since of the most recent works in Schulz studies, this one has the best chance of reaching a wide public; as the idea of the “guide” suggests, it may be many readers’ first encounter with a kind of pop-cultural reinterpreta-tion of Schulz. The book contains four sections: the first consists of essayistic texts that interpret Schulz’s writing, the second and most interesting, in addition to an essay by Majmurek discussing the filmic structure of Schulz’s prose and the consequences this carries for film adapta-tions of his work, also includes an interview with the Quay Brothers, who have contributed significantly to spreading Schulz’s renown around the world through their film Street of Crocodiles, which is discussed in an article by Peter Gre-enaway. The segment on film is completed by a plan for a feature film inspired by the last months of Schulz’s life, written by Maciej Pisuk, screenwriter of the popular film You Are God (Jesteś Bogiem), about the cult hip-hop group Paktofonika. The third portion of the magazine is made up

14 M.Urbanowski’sarticle“Schulzipolityka”isaninterestingattempttorevealthepoliticalpotential of Schulz’s texts; see Wielogłos 2(16)/2013 (that issue of the magazine is to a large extent devoted to Schulz– it contains texts on the topos of the sanatorium, references to Kleist and to the problem of simulacra).

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of creative literary works inspired by Schulz. These trib-utes were written by “Schulzoid” writers Andrzej Szpindler and Jacek Dobrowolski. Szpindler belongs to the cohort of post-avantgarde writers associated with Ha!art; his prose experiments with poetic associations and the destruction of semantic linkages in narration. The essence of such texts cannot be conveyed by a paraphrase, so here is a selected small glimpse of “Różowy Murzyn” (The Pink Moor):

Lord, fallen, the number of gods,” I say, “that’s what I’m saying, the number of gods, you hear me, you lis-ten better when you say what you’re talking about. The number of gods is what you say. Because, who imagines space as a body? The external as an element, a total mug-out. Telesnout, kill the creations! No businessman like a telesthenic picnic. No. The centrally external = el-ement. Everything checkered, skipping the centre, has got to land one. A little hodgepodge of e-motion. Mana Mane Tekel Fares. Boom-boom face shekel half-face / two halves of a face. Talent is 60 min. Dudeface. ‘Cause who imagines an intergalactic threatening text mes-sage as levelled-out fame, a pink little protracted body, supersmart because it’s in a visually mental crew?15

It goes on thus for several dozen pages (I haven’t seen any-thing like it in Polish literature since Krzysztof Niewrzędy’s Second life). And though one critic found Szpindler’s rhyth-mic prose to be “an expression of aporetic semantics,” I feel more inclined to diagnose it as something on the

15 A. Szpindler, Różowy Murzyn, [in:] J. Majmurek, ed., Schulz. Przewodnik “Krytyki Politycznej” (Schulz. Krytyka Polytyczna Guide), Warszawa 2012, p. 153.

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borderline between graphomania and insanity, possibly involving mistaking psychedelic drugs for talent. Anyone who can tell me what this has to do with Schulz must be a genius... Fortunately, the second story in the book, “The Magical Journey” (Podróż magiczna) by Jacek Dobrowolski – is an unequivocally more communicative work, a kind of pastiche of the poetics of Schulz and Kafka that draws from Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. The final segment of the book consists of free retellings of texts and motifs from Schulz in the form of comics.

To sum up, then, there is precisely zero political engage-ment of the Krytyka Polityczna type in this book – instead, the author proposes we read Schulz through the categories of periphery, or rather, the dialectic between centre and periphery (choosing The Street of Crocodiles as a starting point). It is hard to see any kind of revelatory interpreta-tion of that problem in this procedure – it is rather an in-terpretative dead end, except for the interesting work done in recent years along those lines by Jerzy Jarzębski.16 Let us therefore concentrate on the critical readings we find in the first portion of the guide, where we may discover some-thing more substantial from an approach of sustained her-meneutic analysis. Here, however, there is likewise a lack of any particularly innovative insight into Schulz’s work, perhaps confirming Markowski’s thesis that Schulzology is the art of footnotes and marginalia. In fact, the essay by Agata Bielik-Robson, continuing Panas’s kabbalistic line of interpretation, even admits as much in its title: “Life in the

16 J.Jarzębski, Prowincja Centrum[in:]Jarzębski,Prowincja Centrum. Przypisy do Schulza (TheProvinceoftheCenter.FootnotestoSchulz),Kraków2005.

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Margins. A Small Appendix to the Topic of ‘Bruno Schulz and Hasidic Kabbala.’”17 Next, Adam Lipszyc (“Schulz na szaro, Schulz przed prawem” [Schulz in Gray, Schulz Be-fore the Law]), interpreting the stories (rarely discussed until recently, but now increasingly a focus of attention) “Dodo,” “Edzio,” “The Pensioner” (Emeryt) and “Solitude” (Samotność), takes on the truly well-travelled theme of the relationship between “poetry” and “prose” in Schulz.18 In this essay, the author advocates his idea of a naïve reading, purged of the interpretative surplus that he finds in previ-ous analyses – the idea of “reading from zero” was Lipszyc’s guiding light in his book of essays Rewizja procesu Józefiny K. i inne lektury od zera (A Reassessment of the Trial of Jo-sephine K. and Other Readings From Zero) and of course in this vision of poetics it is not an interpretative excess, but as a general interpretative method for critical reading it can unfortunately mask ignorance and cognitive laziness (which does not diminish its nimble wit!). Similarly, Aldona Kopkiewicz in her essay on Schulz’s sensualist poetic lan-guage and Marta Konarzewska in an absorbing text about his sadomasochism continue a well-represented interpre-tative tradition in Schulz studies, though an uninitiated reader would have a hard time figuring out to what extent these texts present original analyses, since the authors could not be bothered to examine previous interpretations.

17 This essay was also published in the anthology Bruno od Księgi Blasku, cited above (footnote 7).

18 In another text concerning Schulz, in which he makes a tentative comparison between Schulz’smessianismandJakubFrank’ssect,LipszycappearstoforgetthatthesimilaritiesbetweenthetwowerenotedlongagobyWładysławPanasinhisbooksonSchulz–seeA. Lipszyc, Czerwona Księga Słów Pańskich, czyli Schulza Frankiem, a Franka Schulzem, ale z odrobiną Benjamina, albo druga wiosna i Entsetzen des Entsetzens, albo o czytaniu dosłownym,[in:]BrunoodKsięgiBlasku.

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Likewise Julia Fiedorczuk, in what appears to be an inno-vative reading of Schulz’s prose in terms of “thing studies,” fitting into the recently increasingly popular post-human-ist interpretative perspective, is in fact simply re-writing in the new humanities idiom what are hackneyed ideas, since Schulz is after all one of the most frequently cited examples of poetic reification in Polish literature, and the problem-atic ontological status of his mannequins, undermining anthropocentrism and subjectivity, has already acquired an extensive bibliography. What is at issue is not merely a lack of scholarly rigor or failure to observe common crit-ical standards, but the lack of awareness of the interpre-tation’s banal and derivative character that these authors display, and that can turn into sloppiness or critical care-lessness. When Jakub Majmurek writes emphatically in his essay on Schulz and film that “the cinema does not figure in Schulz’s prose at all, and it appears that the film form never made it to his native Drohobych”19 and draws certain interpretative conclusions from that statement, it is simply misleading, since (to name one example) the extended be-ginning of “July Night” (Noc lipcowa) – important to any interpretation of Schulz –consists of a description of a cin-ema and impressions of film screenings… Interpreters of Schulz often repeat themselves and produce paraphrases of each other, and the sphere of language in their discourse is dominated by unconscious allusions to theory, repetitions and uninspired reiteration of the same quotations, without any sense of the theoretical tradition. This peculiarly lim-ited selective use of Schulz references, sometimes rather

19 J. Majmurek, Filmowe echa w Schulzu, [in:] Schulz, p. 113.

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bizarre, occurs in Bielik-Robson’s article as well; the critic polemicizes with Markowski’s book – which she admits not having read (!) – in the context of its alleged Lacanian read-ing of Schulz (when in fact there is no such interpretation therein).20 In another passage, Bielik-Robson – using the work of American scholar Karen Underhill – discovers that the famous quotation referring to the concept of “panmas-querade” invoked by Schulz in a letter to Witkacy relates to his own works as well as those of his correspondent; but the fact that it relates only to his own, and not to Witkacy’s writings, should be obvious from reading the letter itself.21

Schulz – The Jewish WriterBielik-Robson’s article belongs, of course, to one of the dominant currents of interpretation, criticized in Mar-kowski’s book – reading Schulz in the context of Jewish mysticism (the Lurian kabbala), enhanced here (and often in Schulz studies) by associations with Kafka and Biel-ik-Robson’s usual Freudian contexts. One of many works that continue Panas’s findings, her article demonstrates another general trend among interpretations of Schulz’s works and biography in critical texts of recent years. Such analyses increasingly express the belief – particular-ly prevalent among non-Polish scholars – that Schulz is chiefly, indeed exclusively, a Jewish writer. Here, I am not looking to rehash the dispute over what national literature

20 A. Bielik-Robson, Życie na marginesach. Drobny aneks do kwestii «Bruno Schulz a kabała chasydzka», [in:] Schulz,p.16[alsoinBrunoodKsięgiBlasku,p.248].

21 Bielik-Robson, Życie na marginesach, p. 31 [260] – in fact the entire letter is Schulz’s interpretation of The Cinnamon Shops,andrelatesinnowaytotheworksofWitkacy.Forthe sake of precision I will add that no such assertion is made in Underhill’s doctoral thesis, Schulz and Jewish Modernity (available in internet repositories) either.

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Schulz’s oeuvre belongs to,22 but simply addressing the question of locating his writings in their proper cultural context. I have no intention of taking away from Schulz his Jewish roots and Judaic cultural traditions, but seek to turn our attention to the monopolization of critical dis-course by the dangerously nationalistic, that is, ethnocen-tric drive to attribute Schulz’s work entirely to Jewish cul-ture. To see Schulz as above all a Jewish writer (kabbalist, Frankian messianic, post-Hasid, successor to Kafka, writ-er of the Shoah, kindred spirit to Benjamin, anticipator of Piotr Paziński’s prose, and so on) – these are simply ex post facto perspectives: using today’s understanding and method of defining Jewishness and what it means to be-long to Jewish culture, concepts largely created in postwar America in reaction to the experience of the Holocaust. To justify such a position more broadly, I will refer to a com-petent authority in this matter and quote a long passage from some reflections on the subject by a well-known American writer of Jewish extraction (who was saved from the Holocaust by going to France) – Raymond Federman, who reconstructs the historical status of the concept of the “Jewish writer” as follows:

For it is a fact that the label of ‘Jewish writer’ was invented after World War Two, out of necessity, I sup-pose, after the Holocaust became known as a truth instead of a falsity or a lie.

22 This dispute probably took its most heated form in the quarrel over the export of Schulz’s paintings discovered in the Landau villa from Yad Vashem by envoys of Yad Vashem, and later in the dispute surrounding the trilingual inscription (in Ukrainian, Polish, and Hebrew) on the memorial plaque placed on Schulz’s house in Drohobych, describing him as an “outstandingJewishpainterandwriter,amasterofthePolishword.”

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There were Jewish writers, of course, especially novel-ists, before the Second World War, in many parts of the world as well as in America, or rather there were many writers who happened to be Jewish before the war, but they were writers first, and only incidentally, occassion-aly considered ‘Jewish writers’ (except for those who wrote in Yiddish, or that small group of American Jew-ish writers during the first half of the century – the Ten-ement Writers – who depicted Jewish life in America).

Most of the pre-war Jewish writers did not have much to do, much to say about Jewish life, Jewish history, Jewish tradition, Jewish religion, or Jewish suffering, and no one expected them to deal with these ques-tions. A case in point, Kafka who was labelled a Jewish writer only after World War Two. Before that, he was simply a great writer, an experimental writer. Perhaps the same could be said of Marcel Proust, even though only half-Jewish. Most of the pre-war Jewish writers were more concerned with social and political issues related to the human condition in general, or to the society in which they lived, rather than with specific Jewish problems. Some in fact, were more concerned with aesthetic problems rather than social, political or religious questions. I mean, of course, the fiction writers, not the theologians or historians of Judaism. It is true that the Jewish background of some of these story-tellers became part of the texture of their writ-ing, but it was not the essential part.23

23 R.Federman,“TheNecessityandImpossibilityofBeingaJewishWriter.” http://www.federman.com/rfsrcr5.htm [accessed 24.10.2015].

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This modality of post-Holocaust cultural colonization of authors who have equally strong roots in Central Europe-an culture has begun to be uncritically applied by many Schulz interpreters, particularly – as I noted earlier – Western (and especially American) scholars, and this is also happening in the field of Schulz studies, as exempli-fied in Bielik-Robson’s article, among others. Schulz, like Kafka, provides one example of the object of this kind of reading – which has nothing intrinsically wrong with it or misguided, so long as the author does not become only a Jewish writer, and the peculiar context that includes Polish culture and literature, in its borderland, Galician, Ukrainian version within which Schulz lived and func-tioned, but also the culture of German modernism, in which he was immersed culturally (and more broadly, the multicultural Hapsburg empire), becomes merely an incidental accretion, rather than a substantial aspect of Schulz’s life and work. Of course, the biographical legend of the artist as Jewish victim of the Holocaust often de-termines our reception of Schulz’s prose, but one should be conscious of the mytholigizing potential of that im-age.24 And that is probably the only message of Schulz’s politics that can be extracted from the Krytyka Polytyczna guide. The Celebrification of CriticsmWhile the practice of “transcribing” Schulz into new languages of the humanities can be an interesting en-terprise that opens new spaces of interpretation, there

24 J.JarzębskialsodiscussesinterpretativereconstructionsofSchulz’sworkthattakeintoaccounttheproblemoftheShoahinhisarticle“Schulzomania?”inRadar 6/2012, pp. 4–6.

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is also some risk that in the process the interpretative postulates of the new humanities will impose themselves on the text. Those criteria have been given their fullest treatment in Markowski’s book – they are taken straight from the theses of postmodernism (as well as post-Struc-turalism and deconstructionism). The author of Universal Dissolution declares not only a new way of reading, dis-connected from the rich heritage of Schulz studies (re-jected on the basis of its undue fealty to causality and focus on the exploration of marginalia), but also a new ideal of the rhetorical and persuasive dimension of inter-pretation. What is crucial is the suggestive nature of the text, the interpreter’s ability to convince the reader and win him over to his side – the “struggle for recognition.” To write about literature is to impose one’s own point of view, in competition with previous interpretations, which in the process are in some way rendered invalid (Markow-ski’s chief competitor is Panas, though he forgets, in the course of refuting Schulz’s Jewish messianism, that he seeks to demonstrate that Panas’s thesis is objectively erroneous and that his own interpretation is the oblig-atory, correct one). Furthermore, such an interpretation has the power to change the nature of the object under examination, which, deprived of its specific features and contexts, exists in a state of total dependence on its in-terpretation. Markowski here cites, among other exam-ples, Derrida’s readings of Celan or Joyce; these artists, from all accounts, can no longer be perceived outside of that interpretative context.

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The criteria set out by Markowski also fit the texts I have referred to from the Krytyka Polityczna Guide to Schulz – well-written, rhetorically seductive and perhaps con-vincing, “suitable” for a reader who treats the idea of an intellectual guidebook seriously (because this will be his first encounter, or one of his first, with Schulz’s work, engaging with it at an intellectual level), debatable only for a specialist grounded in the subject. Both books can serve as examples of a process of celebrification affect-ing the sphere of things loosely Schulz-related– to be precise, the creation of a pop-cultural “Schulz” brand, or the emergence of a situation in which the author of The Cinnamon Shops retreats into the background, and what matters most is the disposer of the brand, i.e., the narrator of a gripping story about his own private Schulz, creating a new myth, rather carelessly perhaps, but above all, recognizable and popular, and its name shall be: Panas, Markowski, Bielik-Robson, Lipszyc… In the end, this process nevertheless has positive results as well – Schulzomania may contribute to the banaliza-tion and oversimplification of how we see the Drohobych master’s work, but it will finally lead to its further prom-ulgation. Schulz was himself not afraid of what’s trashy, after all, nor oblivious to the ambivalent charm of mass culture. One might say that the author of The Book even foresaw this situation – if we treat his oeuvre as the equivalent of his mythic Original, subject of many books of criticism:

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Because usually books are like meteors. Each one has one instant, the moment when it takes flight like a phoenix, all of its pages on fire. […] The exegetes of the Book aver that all books seek to be the Original. They only live by the borrowed life that in the moment of flight returns to its old source. So the number of books diminishes, and the Original grows.25

translated by Timothy Williams

25 B. Schulz, Opowiadania. Wybór esejów i listów,ed.J.Jarzębski,Wrocław1998,p.125.

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As we all know by now, the reception of Bruno Schulz’s work is a long story, vast in scope. To free myself from the burden of summarizing its entirety, I will divide it into three categories: homogeneous, antinomic and ambiva-lent. These are important distinctions, since the adop-tion of each one of these interpretative positions leads to a completely different reading strategy.

The first of these perspectives presents Schulz’s writing as manifesting a monolithic and completely formed world-view, and furthermore, often delineates no particular fea-tures of its poetics, influences, conventions and genres em-ployed, or historical context. The category of homogeneity is most frequently selected and applied by commentators who are pursuing ideological agendas in their reading of Schulz, seeking above all confirmation of their own beliefs.

Schulz as Post-Humanist. The Prosthetic Principle of Artistic Creation Agata Rosochacka

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Agata Rosochacka, Schulz as Post-Humanist...

Those who choose the second interpretative approach, probably the most popular one, feel that the meaning of Schulz’s literary legacy resides in his bearing witness to opposing and dramatically dissonant voices in Sanatori-um Under the Sign of the Hourglass and other works. This aporetic conflict appears to testify directly to the pessi-mistic undertone of Schulz’s work, its catastrophic, vin-dictive, or at any rate, deeply melancholic content.

Readings that stress the union of contradictions in Schulz’s views and compositional or narrative solutions appear to be the least selective. They can, however, easily be accused of choosing the least challenging interpreta-tive path, avoiding final decisions, excusing themselves from making any such commitments by means of an all-embracing ambivalence.

Homogeneous readings of Schulz tend to avoid the ques-tion of irony, as it precludes, or at least considerably com-plicates, a monolithic interpretation. However, commen-tators who read the works of the author of The Cinnamon Shops as antinomic or ambivalent are keen to analyze his irony, though they reach different conclusions as to its function. For the antinomically inclined, his irony is simply antiphrasis, the purpose of which is to underscore the impossibility of consolidating Schulz’s world into a coherent whole. Those who favour an ambivalent read-ing instead perceive the ironic nature of Schulz’s work as the literary expression of precisely such a consolidation, a thesis confirmed, apparently, by Schulz himself: “The

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very fact of individual existence contains irony, tomfool-ery, a tongue stuck out in jest.”1

This geography of readerly strategies, though clearly sim-plified, shows that none of them is infallible. We need not be surprised; when reading such outstanding work as we are dealing with in Schulz’s case, it is hard not to fall into rhetorical traps of one’s own making. I find the antinomic perspective to be the furthest from my own. The most ex-act and interpretatively productive approach to the work of the Drohobych writer seems to me the ambivalent read-ing, though I sometimes let myself be led astray by ahomo-geneous interpretation. I probably find it seductive for two reasons. Firstly, to avoid treating ambivalence as a kind of interpretative alibi. Secondly, in view of the fact that Schulz – to use Stanisław Rosiek’s argument – is a writer who builds unusually intimate relationships with his read-ers, resulting in many an interpreter’s falling under the illusion that he or she is the first to get Schulz right.2

***

The problem of the prosthetic body, which I will discuss here, is connected in modernist literature with the phe-nomenon of humanism: this is true, perhaps to an excep-tional degree, in Schulz’s work. Humanistic postulates further give rise to catastrophic motifs, since both are

1 B. Schulz, letter to St. I. Witkiewicz, in Opowiadania. Wybór esejów i listów,Wrocław1998,p. 477. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted (TWD).

2 S.Rosiek,“DlaczegodzisiajnadalczytamyBrunonaSchulza?”,paperread12September2012 during the International Scholarly Conference “Bruno Schulz as a Philosopher and LiteraryTheorist”inDrohobych.

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directly conditioned by the philosophy of language or are products of language. Before proceeding to an interpre-tation of Schulz’s prose oeuvre, I would like to examine how the three threads I have mentioned are developed in his journalistic, critical, and epistolary writings, and also, briefly, how scholars of the Drohobych writer’s work have previously dealt with the questions I raise.

Schulz’s complicated anthropology was identified by earli-er critics as the negation of humanism. A work much-dis-cussed by more recent scholars, Dwugłos o Schulzu (Dia-logue on Schulz)3 is full of accusations of reducing people to a “species of objects,” with “remarkably anti-literary and anti-humanist consequences” resulting.4 Often, the evaluations of those first critics lead today’s scholars to certain conclusions. One of these can be articulated as follows: Schulz was a surprise on the literary scene, who did not receive due recognition from all of his contempo-raries. At the same time, it is remarked that these early critical judgments (by Wyka, Fik, Napierski and others) accurately grasp the fundamentals of Schulz’s ontology and style, though their perceptivity is merely put in the service of negating the Drohobych master’s work. Later Schulz scholars cannot be said to undermine the literary values of Schulz’s works,5 but in their interpretation of his views they often confirm the findings of the participants

3 SeeespeciallyworksbyWłodzimierzBolecki,JerzyJarzębski,MichałPawełMarkowski,ŻanetaNalewajk.

4 K. Wyka, S. Napierski, Dwugłos o Schulzu, [in:] K. Wyka, Stara szuflada, Kraków 1967, pp. 259–271.

5 Some exceptions to this, though deceptive ones, are Janusz Rudnicki’s notes on Schulz, containedinhisbookMękakartoflana,Wrocław2000.

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in the “Dialogue on Schulz,” emphasizing not so much Schulz’s nihilism as his valuable (though far from cheer-ing) diagnosis of the state of the world and the human being, interpreted by them as a catastrophic one.

Thus, Jerzy Spein writes in Bankructwo realności (The Bankruptcy of Reality) about the irreversibly dehuman-izing effects of the negation of contemporary civilization6

and the forceful anti-civilizational eloquence7 of Schulz’s work. Likewise, in Czesława Samojlik’s criticism we read the following:

Schulz’s people are ‘the insulted and humiliated,’ they are Christians no longer in search of a soul, but in search of their very selves, hoping to find themselves in everything and everything in themselves; they are indeed looking for what is most completely opposite to themselves, and the search itself is internally contra-dictory. Schulz is the writer of destitution and long-ing: a destitution which is found by no means only in external circumstances, but seethes deep down in-side his characters; externality is remotely invincible. These characters long for individual existence amid the gray monotony of everyday life in all its triviality and, at the same time, never find contentment in the monotony that is their proper sphere of being.8

6 J. Speina, Bankructwo realności: proza Brunona Schulza, Warszawa 1974, p. 69.7 Speina, Bankructwo realności, p. 107.8 Cz. Samojlik, Groteska – pisarstwo wszechstronnie banalne… Sprawa prozy Brunona

Schulza, in Z problemów literatury polskiej XX wieku,vol.2,ed.A.Brodzka,Z.Żabicki,Warszawa 1965, p. 295.

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In the newest readings of Schulz, we also encounter judg-ments ruling out any interpretation that would stress the affirmation in Schulz’s work of nature, civilization or the times in which the author lived. Michał Paweł Markow-ski finds that “Schulz’s characters and readers are con-demned to melancholy,”9 and, summarizing a book devot-ed to the author of “Spring,” writes: “what is truly ours is our death, our dead body, our crippled form, through which life has passed. Life as such, the essence of life, is utterly inaccessible to us, beyond our grasp, which is in-firm and fragmentary, but is ours, human.”10

For Żaneta Nalewajk, a scholar specializing in the prob-lem of the body in the work of Schulz and Gombrowicz, the images of deformed and overgrown bodily forms in Schulz are also connected with deadness: “The culmi-nation of the process of development, but also its excess, are associated here with monstrousness and untimely mourning, and become a portent of inescapable death.”11.

A different view is presented by Włodzimierz Bolecki, above all in “‘Principium individuationis’. Motywy nietzs-cheańskie w twórczości Brunona Schulza” (“Principium individuationis.” Nietzschean Motifs in the Work of Bru-no Schulz), where he claims that Schulz was uncritically fascinated with Nietzsche’s philosophy, primarily with his concept of the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy.

9 M. P. Markowski, Powszechna rozwiązłość: Schulz, egzystencja, literatura, Kraków 2012, p. 52.10 Markowski, Powszechna rozwiązłość, p. 171.11 Ż.Nalewajk,W stronę perspektywizmu: problematyka cielesności w prozie Brunona

Schulza i Witolda Gombrowicza,Gdańsk2012,p.74.

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Jerzy Jarzębski finds other reasons for renouncing the cat-astrophic interpretation of Schulz’s work; he discusses its philosophical implications chiefly in terms of ambivalence. In addition, the absence of death in all its finality within the literary universe created by the author of “The Comet” leads Jarzębski to decisively reject a “pessimistic” reading.

I agree with Jarzębski, though I see Schulz’s works as threatening the personalist view of the human being. That does not mean that they must be read as nihilistic. It often seems that the Drohobych master only undermines a particular understanding of humanism, issuing from the definition of the human being in terms of his antithe-sis. In Markowski’s view:

There are three main ways of answering the ques-tion [of what a human being is] and they are all based on building oppositions. The human, firstly, is what is non-animal, secondly, what is non-divine, thirdly, what is not an object. In all of these cases the human being (or its essence) is defined in terms of negation, through negation of what is non-human: the animal, the divine, or an object. A human being is a human being because it is not an animal, is not a god, and is not a thing.12

Accustomed as we are to thinking in the terms presented above of the human being as graspable only when situat-ed within a polarity, we are somehow forced to perceive

12 M. P. Markowski, Powszechna rozwiązłość, p. 146.

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Schulz’s declarative and literary utterances as melancholy or even nihilistic.

In my opinion, however, we cannot find out what the Schulzian human being is by opposing him to animals, plants, or objects. Here, I agree with the view of Bruno Latour, who wrote:

… the human, as we now understand, cannot be grasped and saved unless that other part of itself, the share of things, is restored to it. So long as humanism is constructed through contrast with the object that has been abandoned to epistemology, neither the hu-man nor the nonhuman can be understood.13

Schulz’s anthropology represents an effort to think about the human being differently than in the categories of what differentiates him from nature. Schulz is opposed to anthro-pocentrism, but does not break with humanism entirely so much as continually distance himself from it, newly contem-plating the human being in the categories of life. Here, he is close to today’s philosophical propositions of post-human-ism,which in their most absorbing variations do not suggest the (perhaps impossible) gesture of definitive abandonment of the humanist perspective. As Monika Bakke writes: “for post-humanism, the prefix ‘post’ does not mean making a clean break with the tradition of humanism, but rather it ‘communicates with the spirits’ that haunt it unceasingly. The past, after all, cannot be forgotten, and the ‘trauma of

13 B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge 1993, p. 136.

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humanism’ must return and will not swiftly be eliminated.” Bakke therefore proposes to “treat post-humanist practices as practices critical not so much of humanism from an out-side position as taking place within humanism.”14

When Schulz writes about the human being as a “brilliant fiction,” he is thus not rejecting humanism, but rather its anthropocentric and personalistic vision. He is subscrib-ing to the belief that “without ceasing to be human be-ings, we cease to be what we were until now, that is, the measure and centre of all things.”15

In what is probably the longest fragment in Schulz’s oeu-vre, plainly expressing his views on the human being, we read the following:

I thought that whoever came up with the idea of the human being, the Greek statue of Hermes, was a genius of lying. The word ‘human being’ in itself is a brilliant fiction, concealing with a beautiful and reassuring lie those abysses and worlds, those undis-charged universes, that individuals are.

There is no human being – there are only sovereign ways of being, infinitely distant from each other, that don’t fit into any uniform formula, that cannot be re-duced to a common denominator. From one human being to another is a leap greater than from a worm to the highest vertebrate. Moving from one face to an-

14 M. Bakke, Bio-transfiguracje: sztuka i estetyka posthumanizmu,Poznań2012,p.19.15 Bakke, Bio-transfiguracje, p. 7.

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other we must rethink and rebuild entirely, we must change all dimensions and postulates. None of the categories that applied when we were talking about one person remains when we stand before another. You referred to individualities as elements... I would say philosophers, systems, designs for the world, reci-pes for a world… That is what human beings are.

An entire world could be created from each of those recipes. When I meet a new person, all of my previ-ous experiences, anticipations, and tactics prepared in advance become useless. Between me and each new person the world begins anew, as if nothing had been yet established and determined. How naive and dull is the classroom, academic physiognomy that sees in a facial expression merely a residue, a stratum of many mimicking movements – muscle cramps.16

Humanism, as an unambiguous definition of the human being in terms of negations, has a closed, consistent form. The human being thus imagined does not exist; he per-ished in the catastrophe (more about this in a moment). The post-catastrophe convalescent has not forgotten the idea to which he earlier subscribed, nor has he rejected it with hate, but he is experimenting with its remnants. Is that because he has nothing else left? Perhaps also be-cause in the experiment lies the surprise of life. Life is an experiment, a test of impermanent forms, continuation, addition, supplementation.

16 B. Schulz, letter to Maria Kasprowiczowa. Listy Brunona Schulza, http://www.brunoschulz.org/kasprowiczowej.htm [accessed 24.08.2015].

http://www.brunoschulz.org/kasprowiczowej.htm

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For Schulz, a human being is a fleeting materialization, a momentary adoption of certain boundaries and conven-tions.17 “But within these boundaries there is space enough for all heavens, for all hells. Were not the ancients wiser, when they put the accent not on form, but on content? Con-tent that burst out from the human form and ran through the whole scope of their mythology. The ancients who saw gods being born everywhere.”18 The human being, who has remembered his “not entirely closed” form, is a participant in the “primeval beginnings,” in his presence “things reveal themselves, the silent cabinet rattles after years of silence, the table clicks out a broken word.”19 The human being’s form, provocative in its openness, is therefore not his curse; his active relationship with the world of objects, plants, and animals is an honour, a condition for his creativity. His critical response to the art work of Egga Van Haardt, cited above, presents the apotheosis of the human figure uncon-strained by the conventions of personalist humanism:

“When [Egga] is alone, her blood dances, it branches out inside her fantastically and looms into an obscurely huge, flickering phantom, vibrating in all of its limbs. It is barely distinct from her body, it circles round her, she shrivels up, falling apart like a burnt piece of pa-per, deadening into a black arabesque.” Egga’s art “dominates the screen not through sight, but through her clairvoyant hand, her replacement organ, the eye

17 B.Schulz,“EggaVanHaardtwpracowni”, Tygodnik Ilustrowany 40/1938, http://www.brunoschulz.org/egga.htm [accessed 25.08.2015].

18 Schulz,“EggaVanHaardtwpracowni.”19 Schulz,“EggaVanHaardtwpracowni.”

http://www.brunoschulz.org/egga.htm

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of the blind man. Whoever has seen Egga’s hand un-derstands that she does not need eyes. The tree of her veins, branching out sevenfold, swarms with creations like the tree of life, creatures wander through it.”20

His rejection of the conventions of personalist human-ism thus binds Schulz, like today’s post-humanists, to ac-knowledge a kinship with non-human matter.21 His treat-ment of this relationship is, in my view, the foundation of his anthropology, as well as his artistic creation.

After these introductory reflections on Schulz’s anthropol-ogy, I would like to examine the reification we so often find in Schulz’s work. This procedure does not necessarily lead to the degradation of the human being. Reducing the hu-man being to an object is degrading only when we have con-tempt for the object. In Schulz’s work, however, the thing is also included in life’s incessant fluctuation. That provokes readers to rethink such stylistic devices as objectification and personification. Reification need not automatically de-preciate the human being, just as personification is not al-ways elevating for animals or objects.22 If we stop assigning these devices evaluative functions, we see their main effect in Schulz’s work – counteracting the “ontological hygiene” of the human being, such hygiene being undesirable to

20 Schulz,“EggaVanHaardtwpracowni.”21 Iamborrowingtheterm“non-human”(nie-ludzki)fromMonikaBakke,whodistinguishesit

fromtheethicallyloaded“inhuman”aswellasthemorestrictlyoppositional“nothuman.”22 Onthistopic,seeS.Wysłouch,Paradoksy reifikacji w literaturze i sztuce, [in:] Człowiek i rzecz.

O problemach reifikacji w literaturze, filozofii i sztuce,ed.S.Wysłouch,B.Kaniewska,Poznań1999.ThoughthisPoznańscholartakesintoaccountambiguitiesofreification,theyresultnotfrom changes in thinking about the human being but from more concrete narrative contexts.

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the Drohobych master. Precisely that total dissociation of the human being from the rest of the world, situating him through negation of manifold forms of life, signifies soli-tude for Schulz.23 Placing the human being in a relational existence, connected with other beings, and presenting life above everything else, can even be understood as “the end of the lonely and therefore impoverished human being, lonely and impoverished because reduced exclusively to himself.”24

In the passage cited from “Egga Van Haardt,” the influence of Bergsonism is clearly visible. Czesław Karkowski, dis-cussing the work of Schulz and Leśmian, finds their shared inspiration in the philosophy presented by Bergson in Cre-ative Evolution. This inspiration, Karkowski claims, is based on the approach to the human being’s relationship with external reality. As Karkowski writes, for Bergson “reality is governed by the two opposing forces of instinct and in-tellect, and human cognitive activity also manifests itself in two ways: in direct, intuitive sensing of ‘the essence of a thing,’ in the emotional act of becoming one with nature experiencing the world metaphysically, and in intellectu-al knowledge, mediated through language. The activity of the intellect, of an eminently pragmatic and instrumen-tal nature, involves holding reality, which is moving and changing practically all the time, still, as a way of cram-ming it into the stiff framework of our mental concepts.”25 Karkowski calls this diagnosis a “logical dichotomy.”

23 CompareinparticularwithSchulz’sshortstories“ThePensioner”(Emeryt)and“Solitude”(Samotność).

24 Bakke, Bio-transfiguracje, p. 87.25 Cz.Karkowski,“Poezjanaśmietniku”,Poezja (Poetry) 6/1978, p. 64.

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At the same time, though I completely agree that Schulz was certainly inspired by Bergson’s philosophy, I none-theless find that Schulz also complicates this dichoto-my between rational and intuitive knowledge. Further-more, Bergson scholars do not interpret the dichotomy to be as unambiguous as Karkowski finds it. Elizabeth Grosz writes:

In an extraordinary passage, Bergson claims that the intellect transforms matter into things, which render them as prostheses, artificial organs, and, in a sur-prising reversal, simultaneously humanizes or orders nature, appends itself as a kind of prosthesis to inor-ganic matter itself, to function as its rational or con-ceptual supplement, its conscious rendering. Matter and life become reflections, through the ordering the intellect makes of the world.26

Elsewhere, Grosz writes:

For Bergson, life expands itself by generating new ca-pacities in both the living being and the prosthetic object. […] objects, in being extricated from the multi-plicity of connections they exert in the material world, are given new qualities, new capacities, a virtuality that they lack in their given form.27

26 E. Grosz, Architecture from Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, MIT Press 2001, p. 178.27 E. Grosz, Prosthetic Objects, [in:] idem, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, Duke

University Press 2005, 151. See also Alia Al-Saji, When Thinking Hesitates: Philosophy as Prosthesis and Transformative Vision,“TheSouthernJournalofPhilosophy”,Volume50,Issue 2, 351–361, June 2012.

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The Schulz image that expressively shows how reason and creation need not be opposed to each other is the labo-ratory. This image, important for modernism and later currents in thought, acquires a new resonance in Schulz’s work as a place where life’s potential is explored.

For Schulz is not the bearer of an unambiguous critique of civilization or the attainments of science. In Schulz’s uni-verse, the father-experimenter of the laboratory is a com-bination of the terrifying mad scientist à la Dr. Franken-stein and the magical, fascinating alchemist of whom Arkadiusz Kalin wrote in his inspiring interpretation of “The Comet”:

we are here given an uncontradictory, chiasmatic (in the Derridean sense, meaning of double provenance) fusion of various thought traditions. The father’s experiments are ambiguous from the start – Schulz in one sentence rams together the tradition of empirical, experimentally verified science with esoteric knowledge.28

Schulz is thus not condemned to unrelieved melancholy at the loss of the mythical world through its conquest by the scientist. The scientist, on the contrary, is still a dreamer and an artist, whose experimental activity treats life as the most valuable artistic material. Jerzy Ficowski wonderfully encapsulates this in Regiony wielkiej herezji (Regions of the Great Heresy): “the ‘glass and eye of the learned’ held in

28 A.Kalin,“Zaklinaniekatastrofy–ezoterykainaukawKomecieBrunonaSchulza”,paperpresentedonJune26,2012attheconference“Schulz.BetweenMythandPhilosophy”inWarsaw.

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such contempt by the Romantics are here adapted to a new use and undergo a kind of metamorphosis: they become an enchanted hybrid of magnifying glass and kaleidoscope.”29

We can, it seems, expand the image of the laboratory to include the rest of Schulz’s world, because its logic implies mixing together different scales. Latour finds that in the laboratory, “differences of scale are made irrelevant and… the very content of the trials made within the walls of the laboratory can alter the composition of society.”30 The labo-ratory thus operates to erase the boundaries between inside and outside; we may read the Father’s laboratory this way, but also literature itself: the text as a kind of laboratory.

The Father’s experiments bring to mind not so much con-temporary science’s demiurgic endeavours as the ambig-uously motivated works of artists from the bio-art school. Here, I am thinking above all of such artists as Grzegorz Kowalski, Daniel Lee, Oleg Kulik and Eduardo Kac, who in different ways “provoke rapprochement with bodies which are not human.”31 In the context of Schulz’s writing, a par-ticularly interesting figure from bio-art is Eduardo Kac, creator of the first genetically modified animal to originate as a work of art, the piece entitled GFP Bunny. The artist grafted alien genetic material – the green fluorescent pro-tein that occurs naturally in a species of medusa – onto

29 J.Ficowski,Regiony wielkiej herezji: rzecz o Brunonie Schulzu, Warszawa 1992, pp. 173–174.

30 B.Latour,“GiveMeaLaboratoryandIwillRaisetheWorld,”inScience Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science, ed. Karin Knorr-Cetina, Michael Joseph Mulkay, London 1983, p. 159.

31 Bakke, Bio-transfiguracje, 93.

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the rabbit’s zygotes. In Bakke’s words: “The rabbit’s body can thus glow with a bright green light, though it does not do so at all times, only after having been activated by a blue light.”32 Another Kac art work discussed by Bakke is his creation of the genetically modified plant Edunia, part of a larger project entitled The Natural History of Enigma. Edunia is a plant onto which the artist grafted his own genetic material. “Kac calls this life form a ‘plantimal.’”33 Kac’s work undermines “ontological hygiene” and high-lights the proximity of human and not-human beings, while also directing our attention to the analogous con-struction of the human body and a plant.

My perhaps rather fanciful reference to the work of bio-art-ists in the context of the Father’s experiments in Schulz’s short stories underscores the fact that these experiments performed on matter serve no functional or technological goal, but rather constitute the scientist-artist’s creative work. Monika Bakke proposes categorizing such creative work as zoe-aesthetics, creation focused on life, more-over, on life understood more broadly than simply bios. As an interpretative category, zoe-aesthetics might also be applied to Schulz’s prose.

Schulz’s vision of the human being is not as straightfor-ward as it might appear from the above considerations. The ramifications of Schulz’s post-humanist anthropolo-gy have been presented too unequivocally to elucidate the

32 Bakke, Bio-transfiguracje, 168.33 Bakke, Bio-transfiguracje, 172.

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hitherto neglected possibilities for a humanist reading of the Drohobych master’s work.

At the same time, however, that anthropology is more complicated, and has its source in a certain type of cat-astrophism. It is a rather particular catastrophism, not awaiting the annihilation of the world and humanity, but accepting that we have already survived a catastro-phe, that we are functioning in a post-catastrophic world.

In Schulz’s “Wanderings of a Sceptic,” the rubble of the world has been “ploughed through and through by the indefatigable plough of human thought,” and the ca-tastrophe that has afflicted the world is thus a catastro-phe brought upon it by human beings. Yet what has un-dergone collapse is precisely the anthropocentric. Before the catastrophe, the world had “relatively human pro-portions.” What had been domesticated was now desert-ed, pressed through a narrow-hatched strainer, such as “Freudianism and psychoanalysis, the theory of relativi-ty and microphysics, quantum theory and non-Euclidean geometry.” The human being was stripped of his faith in the world’s permanent shapes and his own separate sta-tus. Schulz vividly describes the landscape after the ca-tastrophe. It is full of remains of thoughts and people; splintered ideas and body parts protrude from the “debris of culture.” Nonetheless, what is left of life lies amid the rubble. This is not what we know from Aristotle under the name bios, it is not concrete, singular, unrepeatable

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life expressible in easily grasped concepts. It is a kind of life closely related to the life of matter, life that makes the remains of a human being equal to the remains of plants and animals, life that knows no teleological hierarchy, a zoe kind of life. It is zoe that rules the dynamics that animate the “debris of culture,” initiating some astonish-ing combinations.

Who are the survivors of the catastrophe? Schulz main-tains that only the dead or convalescents could have sur-vived it. Who, then, is the wanderer who has survived his own death, who knows that he himself is matter, a part of the pulverized debris of culture? It is a human being who can no longer think of himself in the categories of the centre, who has felt his kinship with the rest of the cosmic garbage heap, a human being who no longer knows his own definition. For the personalist definition has been lost in the catastrophe. We may add evolution, transplants, and technologzied bodies to the list containing psychoanaly-sis and quantum theory, as well as the bacteria who live in our bodies and the inability to find a clear boundary between ourselves and the animals. As Stefan Chwin has written, Schulz’s age was the age of transplantation, in which “the image of the body as a unique psycho-physical unit, whose foundation is the individual soul, the endur-ing principium individuationis, departs into the irretriev-able past.”34 The body also became the site of artificial, prosthetic organs. In Jerzy Jarzębski’s words:

34 S. Chwin, “Grzeszne manipulacje”. Historia sztuki a historia medycyny, [in:] Czytanie Schulza. Materiały międzynarodowej sesji naukowej Bruno Schulz – w stulecie urodzin i w pięćdziesięciolecie śmierci,ed.J.Jarzębski,Kraków1994,p.278.

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From the beginning of the twentieth century onward, the human body is treated increasingly unceremo-niously by medicine, becoming an object of surgical intervention, bolder and bolder use of transplants, fi-nally undergoing cyborgization, the union of the nat-ural body with implanted mechanical devices. These processes activate society’s deeply rooted fear of the destruction of human identity, and simultaneously fascinate creative minds eager to invent […] bizarre mechanical-biological hybrids.35

What does a convalescent do? What can he begin after his return from the dead? Schulz’s sceptic challenges matter, arranging it according to the new, absurd prin-ciples, since there are no others. Are the wanderer’s pas-times a symptom of desperation, however? Perhaps they are a symptom of the madness he must face after experi-encing death, when the known meaning of the world has disintegrated? The sceptic “pokes his walking stick at the rubble in a melancholy way: problems and more problems, splinters, shards, and fragments of problems. Here a sev-ered head looks askance, there a leg scrambles out, tum-bles and hobbles along by itself through the dump.” We thus see in the wanderer a certain melancholy, a kind of tenderness for the old order, an irreparable sense of loss. But when an old idea tries to raise its head, to join its old torso, the wanderer stifles this tendency: “He may seem to be claiming stolen limbs on behalf of a damaged idea,

35 J.Jarzębski,Schulz,Wrocław1999,p.149.

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but woe to this recipient of special attention. He will soon suffocate it in the surplus of reclaimed innards.”

For what would the creature risen from the pulverized body be? A monstrous memory, a bungled copy of a world that no longer exists. Its stitches and scars would constant-ly draw notice, as it frightened onlookers with the death it lived through. The wanderer therefore prefers to leave melancholy and longing where they belong, and move on to experiments instead of false repetition, choosing to see what unpredictable addition to the world comes next.

The new longing for adventure, for the untasted and untried, fills his chest with a strange sigh. And may-be it’s good that everything lies in rubble, that there is nothing sacred anymore, no ties, laws, or dogmas, that everything is permitted and everything can be expected, that this one time we can reconstruct ourselves from the rubble according to our own whim – at one’s pleasure, following an illusion that we do not yet apprehend.

The catastrophe that Schulz writes about in “Wan-derings of a Sceptic” is thus not so much an experi-ence of annihilation or even the extinguishment of hope as an ambivalent situation of both longing for the sheltered world before the cataclysm and a fas-cination, considerably stronger than that nostalgia, with the new creative possibilities, a dazzlement at the absence of obligation to the lost forms. As Schulz writes of his own work: “What is the meaning of this

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universal disillusionment with reality – I cannot say. I will only say that it would be insupportable, if it did not meet with compensation in some other dimension. In some way we experience deep satisfaction from that loosening of the fabric of reality, we are interested in this bankruptcy of the real […]. Destruction? But the fact that this content has become a work of art means that we affirm it, that our spontaneous depths have spoken in its favour.36

A similar ambivalence can, I believe, be found in the pas-sages from “The Mythologization of Reality” on the sub-ject of language. “The first word was a hallucination, spin-ning around the meaning of light, it was the great universal whole. The word in its colloquial contemporary meaning is only a fragment, a rudiment of some earlier all-embracing, integral mythology. That is why it has a tendency toward growth, toward regeneration, toward replenishment in its full meaning. The life of the word is based on its tightening and tautening for thousands of combinations, like the quar-tered body of the snake in the legend, whose pieces search for each other in the dark.37 (Emphasis mine – A.R.)

These statements have almost always been interpreted as unambiguous expressions of nostalgia for the lost Word. Yet if we look closely at the legend of the snake to which Schulz refers, the situation becomes more complicated. Until now, commentators have not read the reference as

36 B. Schulz, Letter to St. I. Witkiewicz, in Opowiadania, p. 478.37 B. Schulz, Mityzacja rzeczywistości, in Opowiadania, p. 384.

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citing a precise, particular legend.38 What is more, inter-preters of the Schulz text such as Władysław Panas lean toward identifying the “light” and “meaning” in the pas-sage with each other, though an editor cannot have failed to notice the ambiguity of the formulation (it may refer to “light endowed with meaning”) and would not have let a simple printer’s error pass.39 If, however, we accept that the snake of legend to whom Schulz refers is Apep (Aph-opis, Apepi) from Egyptian mythology, the phrase about spinning around the light becomes clear. The Egyptian god Ra, identified with light or the sun, “insures the sta-bility of the cosmos […]. And indeed this cosmogony is repeated every morning, when the solar god ‘repels’ the snake Apophis, though unable to destroy him.”40 The leg-end claims that each day the snake was bashed to pieces by Ra, and at night his members returned to each other, in accordance with the story Schulz mentions (the pieces of the snake’s body look for each other in the darkness). The placement of the legend in Schulz’s piece reveals an astonishing interpretative consistency.

If Ra quarters Apep, then the “meaning of light,” Schulz’s myth, breaks language (the body of the snake) into pieces. This appears to signify that full presence means the dismem-berment of language. And it is only thanks to this mutilation that the dynamism necessary for creation, for the gravita-tion of individual pieces toward each other, is made possible. As Schulz writes: “Speech is the human being’s metaphys-

38 CompareespeciallywithJarzębski’scommentaryinSchulz, Opowiadania, p. 384, footnote 4.39 Rosiek,“DlaczegodzisiajnadalczytamyBrunonaSchulza?”40 M. Eliade, A History of Religious Idea, trans. Willard R. Trask, vol. 1, Chicago 1985, p. 92.

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ical organ. However, the word over time becomes stiff, gets worn out, and ceases to be a conductor of new meanings. The poet restores words’ conductive capacity through new collisions, that emerge from accumulation.”41 The impulse toward new poetic combinations of words would not exist if the body of the language-snake remained whole.

(Various legends developed from the myth of Apep. One tells the story of the “joint snake”; according to this ver-sion, when you replace one of the snake’s dismembered parts with a knife, the new union of the parts incorpo-rates the blade with the other pieces.42 The legend was also adopted by Benjamin Franklin as the visual repre-sentation of the union of British colonies, with the slogan “Join or die.”43 I cite these iterations of the legend to show its ubiquity.)

An analogy can therefore be drawn between Schulz’s body of the world, subject to metamorphoses, and lan-guage with its continual reconfigurations. This parallel was also perceived by Hans Bellmer, the affinity of whose work with Schulz’s artistic imagination has often been noted: “The body is like a sentence that needs to be bro-ken up into individual words and with the help of succes-sive, endlessly multiplied anagrams have its real meaning discovered anew.”44

41 Bruno Schulz, Mityzacja rzeczywistości, in Opowiadania, p. 386.42 Seethearticle“JointSnake”attheMythBestswebsite,http://www.mythicalcreatureslist.

com/creature.php?beast=Joint+Snake [accessed 28.08.2015].43 Seethearticle“Join,orDie”atWikipedia,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join,_or_Die

[accessed 28.08.2015].44 H. Bellmer, Mała anatomia, Lublin 1994.

http://www.mythicalcreatureslist.com/creature.php?beast=Joint+Snake

http://www.mythicalcreatureslist.com/creature.php?beast=Joint+Snake

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join,_or_Die

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Schulz scholars have paid heed to the analogy between fractured bodies and fragmented language. Tadeusz Rachwał declared that from what we read in such writings as “The Mythologization of Reality,” it follows that: “the current situation for the word is that of a patient with an amputated leg. The patient continues to feel its presence, despite the reality of having a disability.”45

Włodzimierz Bolecki46 and Krzysztof Stala,47 the most penetrating interpreters of the Drohobych master’s style, have also written extensively on the interdependence of language and the body. For both, the relationship is man-ifested in, among other things, the specificity of Schulz’s metaphors, which typically gravitate toward a certain lit-eralism. As Stala writes: “Reality changes in such a way as to ‘adapt’ to the metaphors created in language, chas-es after them, attempts to catch up with the ‘liberated’ word.”48 As a result of this use of metaphor in Schulz’s work, “the word is made flesh” in the sense of literal bodi-ly representations in the world of his short stories.

Prosthetic logic in Schulz’s oeuvre through “the grafting of the human onto the natural becomes as much a possi-ble source of creativity as its figural horizon.”49

45 T.Rachwał,Remityzacja słowa. Rzecz o manekinach w prozie Brunona Schulza, [in:] Znak i semioza,ed.W.KalagaandT.Sławek,Katowice1985,p.118.

46 W. Bolecki, Język poetycki i proza: twórczość Brunona Schulza, [in:] Bolecki, Poetycki model prozy w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym. Witkacy, Gombrowicz, Schulz, Kraków 1996.

47 K. Stala, Na marginesach rzeczywistości. O paradoksach przedstawienia w twórczości Brunona Schulza, Warszawa 1995.

48 Stala, Na marginesach rzeczywistości, p. 168.49 Stala, Na marginesach rzeczywistości, p. 90.

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To conclude, I wish to cite another remark of Stala’s, while keeping in mind the story of the snake whose mutilated body internalizes the knife’s blade:

Creation understood as a supplement to the great book of the world, a seemingly insignificant and in-formal extension, but which grows into it over time, changing our view of the world in an imperceptible way, indiscernibly but consistently revolutionizing tradition, seen as an inseparable part of existence. The paradoxical and authoritative nature of the offi-cial logic of mimesis (model – copy, nature – creation, inside/idea – outside/appearances) is here creatively undermined by the logic of non-exclusivity, shared presence, growth and implantation; the logic of the supplement that relieves contradictions.50


50 Stala, Na marginesach rzeczywistości, p. 50.

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The Cinnamon Shops and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass are inhabited by many crippled characters, dis-abled both mentally and physically. The title characters of the stories “Dodo” and “Edzio” undoubtedly fit into this category, as well as Uncle Hieronimus and the beggar Tłu-ja, but we should also consider how ageing is a form of infirmity in Bruno Schulz’s work– as we see in the experi-ences of old Jacob, but also the older people in the stories “Solitude” (Samotność) and “A Pensioner” (Emeryt), as well as the cyborgization of which Uncle Edward, turned into an electric bell, becomes an inadvertent victim.1 We may also discuss mannequins or dummies in terms of dis-ability, but, as Jerzy Jarzębski notes, “the point here is not being an invalid so much as the lack intrinsic to the ut-

1 Uncle Edward’s metamorphosis reminds one of fantasies of prosthetic bodies containing foreignelements,oftenmechanicallyoperating.SeeA.Rosochacka,“Potworneciałaprotetycznego.Obcośćuwewnętrzniona”,Świat i Słowo 1/2012, pp. 125–135.

Figures of Infirmity: People with Disabilities in Bruno Schulz’s Short StoriesAleksandra Smusz

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Aleksandra Smusz, Figures of Infirmity...

most being of these creatures, their unfulfilled existence, relating to their simulated life.”2 It is easy to notice that in stories by the author of “Spring” (Wiosna) being crippled is a manifestation of the motif, typical in these works, of the male characters’ failure.3 The problem of infirmity constitutes an important avenue for interpreting Schulz’s short stories, one hitherto neglected by scholars.

There are at least two reasons why the author of “Spring” was so eager to introduce characters with disabilities into his short stories. In the first place, infirmity afflicted his two cousins, who are artistically transformed in the sto-ries “Dodo” and “Edzio.”4 Schulz had grown accustomed to the presence of disabled people in his immediate en-vironment and made them characters in his “personal mythology.” In the second place, human imperfection interests the author of the “Treatise on Mannequins” as an atypical concentration of matter. The experience of old age was also close to Schulz, since he had taken care of his sick father and other unwell members of his family.

The Drohobych artist, by placing handicapped and elder-ly people in his gallery of characters, turns readers’ at-tention to many serious problems, vital in his time and ours. This article, due to limited space, will concentrate on the image of disability in the short stories “Dodo” and “Edzio.” Before describing Schulz’s visions of infirmity,

2 J.Jarzębski,Schulz,Wrocław1999,p.181.3 Jarzębski,Schulz, p. 181.4 J.Ficowski,Regiony wielkiej herezji i okolice. Bruno Schulz i jego mitologia, Sejny 2002,

pp. 70–71, 461. Schulz often drew his cousin, Dawid Heimberg, looking with fascination at his unnaturally large head. That relative was the original model for the character of Dodo.

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however, a short overview of how people with disabilities lived in the writer’s era may help.

The interwar period saw the establishment of the first schools for people with disabilities in Poland. In 1921, at the initiative of Maria Grzegorzewska, the Academy of Special Education (now the Maria Grzegorzewska Univer-sity) was created for the purpose of preparing teachers to work with handicapped students.5 Since then, new insti-tutions for the education of people with disabilities have gradually multiplied. Unfortunately, such undertakings were slow to develop. For example, in 1921 there existed no more than eight special schools, and seven years lat-er– only 29.6 Furthermore, they were unevenly distribut-ed geographically. The greatest number were found in the western and central voivodeships, with a great deal fewer located in the southern and eastern ones.7 The require-ment of schooling encompassed children with disabilities only in cases where there was an appropriate establish-ment in the vicinity of their homes. The institutions that were established thus helped few of them, with repercus-sions for the tens of thousands of people with disabilities in Poland– most were condemned to social exclusion from early childhood, due to their lack of access to education. In the best of cases, this majority were taken care of by their family and relatives, who were usually ill-prepared for such a task.

5 Z.Sękowska,Pedagogika specjalna. Zarys, Warszawa 1985, p. 173.6 J. Wyczesany, Pedagogika upośledzonych umysłowo. Wybrane zagadnienia, revised fourth

edition, Kraków 2004, p. 67.7 Sękowska,Pedagogika..., op. cit., p. 173.

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According to a certain stereotype, interpretative contexts that relate to the social setting of the interwar period are of little use in reading Schulz’s work, except perhaps the depiction of changes occurring in Drohobych as a result of capitalist expansion. There are, however, other angles that equally justify invoking those contexts. Read through the social prism, the stories “Dodo” and “Edzio” become sad documents of the interwar reality. Schulz devotes these stories entirely to the eponymous disabled charac-ters, thereby in some sense ennobling them.

Dodo is a mentally underdeveloped man, the cousin of the story’s narrator, whose name is Józef. Dodo’s infirmity is immediately apparent – his unnaturally large head sig-nals his affliction. The narrator makes an ironical remark, noting that Dodo’s hat “had been specially made to fit the dimensions of his skull.”8 He further explains:

Once, long ago, when still a child, Dodo had been stricken by a serious brain sickness, during which he had lain unconscious for many months, closer to death than life. And when finally he did recover, af-ter all, it transpired that he had been withdrawn from circulation; that he no longer belonged to the commu-nity of rational people.9

We see that the character was stricken with his handi-cap in childhood, as the result of a serious illness. This

8 B.Schulz,“Dodo,”translatedbyJohnCurranDavis.Onlineeditionatschulzian.net, http://www.schulzian.net/translation/sanatorium.htm [accessed 17.08.2015].

9 Schulz,“Dodo,”trans.Davis.

http://www.schulzian.net/translation/sanatorium.htm

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misfortune deprived him of the possibility of functioning normally in society. Despite his infirmity, Dodo has an in-teresting face, which makes an impression on Józef: “... his features assumed the shape of those experiences that had passed him by. They imputed some biography that had never happened, but which—inscribed nowhere save in the sphere of the possible—modelled and carved his coun-tenance into the illusory mask of a great tragedian, filled with the sadness and knowledge of all things.”10

The quoted passage shows a certain sarcasm on the part of the narrator, who looks on helplessly at Dodo, aware of his unrealized potential. The depth of the character’s dis-ability is forcibly confirmed by his communicative skills or lack thereof. The man is able to speak, but does so with enormous effort, using monosyllables and failing to make eye contact with his interlocutor. The sense of his utter-ances is limited to elementary meanings which, moreover, relate exclusively to the present moment. The deficiencies of Dodo’s verbal expression are compensated for by his gift for mimicry and gesticulation: “He was sometimes able to sustain the conversation for a few minutes more, beyond that scope, but only due to a stock of seeming-ly meaningful expressions and gestures to which he was disposed, whose ambiguity served him well enough in all situations, compensating for what he lacked in articulate speech, sustaining by their lively mimicry a suggestion of percipient empathy.”11

10 Schulz,“Dodo.”11 Schulz,“Dodo.”

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Such behavior testifies to the fact that the person with a disability wants to make contact with his environment, but does not know how to do so– perhaps because no one has taught him how. In this situation, he attempts to retain the attention of his conversation partners using nonverbal communication. The narrator states that in his interactions with other people, the invalid Dodo usual-ly plays the role of “an extra, a passive observer.”12 All of that proves that Dodo is curious about the world, but in his discoveries encounters a barrier difficult to surmount, since he is unable to communicate with people – and it is extremely probable that his existence would look com-pletely different if someone had helped him shape that ability in the years of his schooling.

As it is, the character lives in a quotidian monotony, re-maining an utterly inactive person. Fortunately, he does not suffer, since he is unaware of his handicap:

Should anyone imagine that Dodo protested inwardly against this state of affairs, they were [would be] mis-taken. Ingenuous and unsurprised, in sedate assent and with imperturbable optimism, he accepted it as his natural way of life. He set his affairs in order. He arranged his particulars within the confines of that uneventful monotony.13

Dodo goes out for a walk every morning and attracts attention in the form of malicious stares, mainly from


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children. He experiences their vexation, and mistaken-ly interprets it as polite concern. This pathetic image presents another problem faced by the mentally handi-capped: the need to have caregiving organized for them at all times of day.

The living conditions of people with disabilities as rep-resented in Schulz’s story also leave much to be desired. Dodo lives in a small room together with his parents, Hi-eronimus and Retycja, and his cousin Karola. His father should also be regarded as infirm, though he was not al-ways that way. Józef explains that “[t]hose who had known him in his younger days claimed that his irrepressible temperament had known neither restraint, consideration nor scruple. He would take great satisfaction in imparting to the terminally ill his insights into the death that await-ed them. He seized upon visits of condolence in order to subject the life of the deceased to harsh criticism, to the dismay of the grieving family, leaving everyone in tears and inconsolable. To people who concealed some unpleas-ant and sensitive personal matter, he offered loud and sneering reproach. But one particular night, he returned home late from a business trip, utterly transformed, numb with fear, and tried to hide under the bed.”14

Since then, the cruel Hieronimus had abandoned his du-bious business interests and withdrawn from life. The events of one day had given him such a shock that he suc-cumbed to mental illness and lost contact with his sur-

14 Schulz,“Dodo.”

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roundings, shutting himself inside the four walls of his apartment. The trauma he suffered had the additional ef-fect of causing him to cease looking after his son:

Uncle Hieronimus and Dodo lived their lives in spite of each other, in two different dimensions that crossed but never quite danced a tango. If ever they met, then each would gaze far past the other, like two animals of differ-ent, distant species that do not quite notice each other.15

Faced with this turn of events, Aunt Retycja looks after the two mentally handicapped men. Bearing the burden alone, she finds herself in a very difficult situation. She cannot find peace even at night, because her son suffers from insomnia. Here is how Józef summarizes Dodo’s sad existence: “In that halfwit’s body, somebody without ex-periences was growing old. Somebody without a crumb of content in him was heading toward death.”16

Schulz’s next character with a disability is the eponymous hero of the story “Edzio,” a twentysomething with palsied [paralyzed?] legs. The narrator mordantly describes the process of deformation of the young man’s body; where he is able-bodied, even athletic, from the waist up, his legs are misshapen and completely inert: “Edzio has a tenden-cy to corpulence; not the soft and spongy kind, but rath-er, the athletic and muscular variety. His shoulders are as


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strong as a bear’s; which is just as well, since his legs—ut-terly wasted and shapeless—are unfit for use.”17

The Schulz Dictionary (Słownik schulzowski) offers an apt commentary on the quoted description, in the following statement: “in this infirm human form, ‘masculine’ traits are concentrated to excess [...] but they represent an im-potent, barren masculinity, confined within itself.”18

Edzio walks with crutches. His lack of a wheelchair means that his entire life is restricted to the cramped space where he lives. The character carries the burden of his body only with the aid of his arms and chest. In order for his body to be capable of enduring this load, the man must exercise his healthy muscles:

Edzio stands half undressed in his room, exercising with his dumbbells. He needs a great deal of strength, twice as much strength in his shoulders, which take the place of his lifeless legs, and so he exercises ar-dently, in secret, all through the night.19

Moving by his own strength, every day Edzio gets himself to the nearby shop, on the ground floor of the tenement where he lives. He buys a newspaper there before going home and carefully reading every page. When he finishes reading he cuts out the parts that interest him and keeps the clippings

17 B.Schulz,“Edzio,”trans.JohnCurranDavis.Onlineeditionatschulzian.net, http://www.schulzian.net/translation/sanatorium.htm [accessed 17.08.2015].

18 “Edzio,”inSłownik schulzowski,ed.W.Bolecki,J.Jarzębski,S.Rosiek,Gdańsk2003,p.97.19 Schulz,“Edzio,”trans.Davis.

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in his scrapbook. Jarzębski notes how this activity of the disabled man joins diligent hard work with a impractical-ity.20 The scene under discussion thus exposes another so-cial problem: the need to prepare people with disabilities who are capable of working for some kind of career. Edzio in fact could work, if he had certain conditions assured him and were able to carry out his tasks in a sitting position.

The narrator, again employing sarcasm, makes an effort to convince the reader that this character derives satisfaction from the life he leads: “in the shadow of his affliction, Edzio takes full advantage of his exceptional privilege of idleness; in his heart of hearts, he is content with his private and, as it were, individually drawn up transaction with fate.”21

Another form of entertainment enjoyed by Edzio is view-ing Adela, the young and attractive servant in Józef’s home, by night. This demands a heroic effort from him, since his housemates, aiming to prevent such escapades, hide his crutches from him in the evening. Edzio there-fore goes out from home, crawling on the ground, and by this means arrives at the window of the woman’s room, located on the ground floor. He looks at her through the window pane: “He approaches like a great, white dog, with the knee-bends of a quadruped, in great, shuffling bounds along the clattering boards of the porch. He has reached Adela’s window now, and with a pained grimace—just as he does every night—he presses his pale, chubby face, gleaming in the moonlight, to the window pane. He

20 J.Jarzębski,Schulz, p. 181.21 Schulz,“Edzio,”trans.Davis.

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speaks, tearfully and insistently. Weeping, he insists that they have locked his crutches away in a wardrobe, and so he must run at nights on all fours, like a dog.”22

The fragment just cited demonstrates another serious problem potentially faced by many people with disabili-ties: the lack of opportunities to build interactions with people of the opposite sex, develop partnerships, and satisfy natural sexual needs. For that reason, frustrated Edzio seeks substitutional means for obtaining erotic sat-isfaction. The young man suffers all the more since he has no way of meeting any women.

Family relationships of people with disabilities can also leave much to be desired. Józef enigmatically declares that “ some very serious dispute is taking place between Edzio and his parents, the background and particulars of which no one really knows.”23 As a result of this dispute, there are frequent quarrels. Perhaps the subject of the disagreement is Edzio’s sin of making nightly “trips” to Adela’s window.24 It culminates with Edzio experiencing physical violence at the hands of his nearest and dearest (particularly his father). Józef comments on the problem ironically, presenting the suffering of the disabled man as an interesting spectacle: “We listen, shaken and ashamed, although not without peculiar satisfaction deriving from the idea of wild and fantastic violence inflicted on the

22 Schulz,“Edzio.”23 Schulz,“Edzio.”24 “Edzio,”inSłownik Schulzowski,ed.W.Bolecki,J.Jarzębski,S.Rosiek,p.98.

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person of an athletic young man, without heed to the pa-ralysis of his legs.”25

In presenting characters with disabilities in Schulz’s short stories, we should not forget Tłuja,26 the insane beggar who appears in “August” and reappears later in “The Comet.” Though she is not given as full a characterization as those of Dodo and Edzio, she is an unusually suggestive creation. The narrator presents her appearance as off-putting:

Tłuja squats amid her yellow blankets and rags; her huge head bristles with a shock of black hair; her face is as contractile as the bellows of an accordion. Oc-casionally, a grimace of anguish folds that accordion into a thousand transverse pleats, but bewilderment soon stretches it back, smoothes out the folds, and re-veals the chinks of her tiny eyes and the moist gums and yellowed teeth behind her snout-like, fleshy lips. Hours pass, filled with heat and boredom, as Tłuja babbles in an undertone, dozes, grumbles quietly, and coughs. A dense swarm of flies covers the slumberer.27

The insane character, unconscious of her actions, becomes an actor in a one-act tragicomedy: “on some far removed square, Tłuja, the mad girl, driven to despair by the teas-ing of boys, began to dance her wild sarabande, kicking her skirts high, to the delight of the crowd.”28

25 Schulz,“Edzio.”26 ThischaracterwasbasedonanactualinhabitantofDrohobych.J.Ficowski,Regiony..., p. 70.27 B.Schulz,“August,”trans.Davis,inThe Cinnamon Shops, http://www.schulzian.net/

translation/shops.htm [accessed 19.08.2015].28 B.Schulz,“TheComet,”trans.Davis.InThe Comet and Other Stories, http://www.

http://www.schulzian.net/translation/shops.htm

http://www.schulzian.net/translation/shops.htm

http://www.schulzian.net/translation/comet.htm

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The narrator’s attitude toward Dodo, Edzio, and Tłuja, all inarguably unhappy people, is worth pondering. His ap-proach gives the impression of a striking, even disturbing lack of concern. Józef appears not to manifest empathy or have consideration for the suffering of people with disabil-ities; instead, he focuses on a behavioristic description of them.29 This happens because in Schulz’s oeuvre, human imperfection becomes matter in a particular state of con-centration, its degeneration caused by the unsubdued pow-ers of nature. Jerzy Ficowski notes that “in this predilection for the elements of deformity in life, there dwells not only a horror of reality, but simultaneously a teratophilia remi-niscent of Surrealism, a deep fascination with the existence of bizarre forms that undermine the stiff rules of reality.”30

Hence the author treates disability as a state in which the body takes on fascinating shapes. Teratophilia is a sexual attraction to physically deformed individuals. Something of that nature is definitely not what is going on here. Ficowski must have had in mind not teratophlia, but teratology– the science that studies developmental defects and abnormali-ties in people and animals.31 To sum up, we can generalize that the author of The Cinnamon Shops delights in creat-ing characters with disabilities because they provide an impetus toward the invention of interesting descriptions.

schulzian.net/translation/comet.htm [accessed 19.08.2015].29 Schulz’s characters appear markedly depreciated when juxtaposed with, for example,

thecharactersinBolesławLeśmian’s“SongsoftheLimping,”peoplewhoarephysicallyimpaired, but nonetheless have dignity and embrace life’s challenges.

30 Ficowski,Regiony..., p. 71.31 See Teratologiain Słownik wyrazów obcych(DictionaryofForeignWords),ed.M.Bańko,

Warszawa 2005, p. 1249.

http://www.schulzian.net/translation/comet.htm

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Furthermore, Jarzębski is worth quoting in his observation that “disability clearly intrigues Schulz, and awakens anx-iety in him, because it is a grotesque diminution of the per-son, an unsettling of the individual’s physical proportions and an intervention in its internal composition.”32

But does Schulz’s narrator really feel satisfaction when he speaks in a sarcastic tone about people with disabilities or looks at their deformed bodies? In fact his irony is imbued with bitterness, frequently a conspicuous signal of human helplessness in the face of insoluble problems. After all, Józef is a deeply sensitive young man and it would be hard to suspect him of ridiculing his neighbours’ or relatives’ pain. His descriptions of them bring to mind above all the many difficulties that face people with disabilities: lack of access to special schools, professional care and orthopedic equipment, the negative attitude from the local commu-nity, who do not accept difference, problems with the or-ganization of one’s free time, poor living conditions, com-munication barriers, a failure to fully satisfy the need to feel safe, and finally, a lack of opportunities for developing meaningful relationships and building long-term part-nerships. These problems are visibly present in the short stories “Dodo” and “Edzio.” The narrator, without naming them explicitly, instead shows them indirectly, with the help of visual descriptions not lacking in irony, powerfully communicating with the reader’s imagination and affect, thereby expressing his position concerning the tough sit-uation in which people with disabilities find themselves.

32 Jarzębski,Schulz, p. 181.

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Today one can say with certainty that although many insti-tutions whose goal is to help people with disabilities have been established since the interwar period, the message of Schulz’s works has not lost any of its urgency, because the handicapped often deal with the same obstacles and ad-versities. What is more, reading The Cinnamon Shops and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass today, we find them attractive as works that acknowledge human imper-fection, living as we do in an age where everyone is in mad pursuit of absolute and total flawlessness.


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Adrian Mrówka, The Father and the Animals...

“At that time my father began to decline in health” (15).1

That is how the protagonist’s father is introduced in The Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy cynamonowe). That protagonist being the narrator of the entire collection of short sto-ries, his father becomes a central figure in the book, and its most mysterious character. Is this mysterious quality linked with the illness from which he suffers? In the en-tire collection, we receive no answer to the question of precisely what his disease is. We are nevertheless given information that, while not helping us much to diagnose

1 Allquotationsaretakenfrom:B.Schulz,Sklepycynamonowe,Kraków,Wrocław1984.Page numbers given in parentheses. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted (TWD).

The Father and the Animals.The Problem of Escape in The Cinnamon ShopsAdrian Mrówka

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what ails the father, describes him in various ways: “he spent whole days in bed” (15), “at times he was agitated and given to altercations” (15), “his eyes would get darker, and on his pale face appeared an expression of suffering or some illicit delight” (16) – all of this information comes at the moment of his introduction. The narrator-son’s observations also go deeper: “[…] his thoughts crept se-cretly into the labyrinth of his insides. He held his breath and listened intently for a moment. And when his gaze returned, whitened and blurred, from those depths, he calmed it with a smile. He did not yet believe and reject-ed as absurdities those claims and proposals that pressed themselves on him” (17). As the plot develops, however, there comes a moment at which the father crosses the threshold into absurdity and at the same time accepts an alarming proposal that he himself has unconscious-ly created, in some way endorsing the words of a French philosopher to the effect that “if need be, […] absurdity can be a source of freedom.”2 There remain two questions to be posed. First, if the absurd can be a source of free-dom, then what does it free us from? Second, when does this “need” occur? In the context of The Cinnamon Shops, both of these questions are matters of great import. Each of them relates to the question of logic as the guarantor of mental health.

Let us go back to the illness of the protagonist’s father. “My father,” the narrator confesses, “was slowly disap-pearing, his eyes were fading” (18). In order to propose

2 G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas, Boston 1994, p. 148.

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an original interpretation of The Cinnamon Shops, let us consider some contemporary theories. They will al-low us to contemplate the father’s “disappearance” and “fading” in the context of Deleuze’s notion of the pro-cess of becoming rather than through the prism of decay as such.

Claire Colebrook, a scholar specializing in the thought of Gilles Deleuze, has precisely described the phenom-enon of becoming as developed in his work. According to Colebrook, the process of becoming imperceptible aims to transform the concept of freedom and to en-able transcendence of the self. The process of becom-ing imperceptible seeks to abandon the perspective from which a person evaluates and organizes life. Cole-brook emphasizes that freedom, true freedom, in this case is not seen as the opposite of necessity, obligation, and the imperatives that culture sets as norms, prohi-bitions, and commands, but in fact as the opposite of the nature that stands beyond culture, restricting and thereby determining it. We find this problem in this cy-cle of Schulz’s stories as well: “[…] we observed father’s passionate interest in animals for the first time. At first it was the passion of both hunter and artist, […] the zoological sympathy of a creature for kindred though very different life forms […]. Only at a later stage did this matter take an amazing, tangled, deeply sinful and unnatural turn” (23−24). Likewise, true freedom demands overcoming humanity, human nature, and thus an affrimation of life, extending beyond the limits

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of the human. Becoming imperceptible postulates lines of flight, movement toward that which is other than the perceptible: away from the human, toward the animal (becoming hybrid).3 In other words, becoming imperceptible means yielding to a process of being in between, being not one thing only. We thus read the following passages: “Crouched underneath enormous pillows, wildly held up by clumps of gray hair, he mut-tered to himself under his breath, plunged wholly into some intricate internal trouble. It could appear that his personality was divided into many conflicting and di-vergent selves […]” (18). “Sometimes he would climb up on the cornice and strike a pose of immobility, symmet-rical to the great big stuffed vulture, […] he would stay there for hours with a foggy gaze and a craftily smil-ing face, only to suddenly flap his arms like wings and start crowing like a rooster as someone was entering” (20). What are the consequences of this? Crossing the threshold of the absurd, the father rejects the status of a human being, who conventionally expresses himself by means of what we generally consider non-animal. “Slowly, one knot at a time, he was easing away from us, point by point he was losing the bonds that tied him to the human community.” (21).

Deleuze and Guattari distinguish among three types of animals. In the first they group domestic animals, the in-dividualized, “Oedipal” ones (“my” cat, “my” dog). These animals, they claim, “draw us into a narcissistic contem-

3 C. Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, London–New York 2002, p. 129.

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plation,”4 directing us, in psychoanalytical terms, toward the categories of father, mother, younger brother and so on, of which they are themselves extensions. The second type, for Deleuze and Guattari, consists of animals with particular traits or attributes. These are animals who take the form of archetypes, mythical models and nation-al symbols. The third type comprises demonic animals, who travel in groups, dangerous, impulsive, representing multiplicity. “A becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, […] in short, a multiplicity.”5 Becoming an animal therefore involves this third type, which we find present in The Cinnamon Shops: “Together with a flock of birds my father, fluttering his arms, attempted in fright to lift off into the air” (26).

Becoming an animal is a unique kind of journey, whose trajectory and nature depend on the intensity of expe-riences. “It is a map of intensities. It is a set of states, each distinct one from the other, grafted onto man in-sofar as he seeks a way out. It is a creative escape route which means nothing else but itself.”6 The third type of animal is disconnected from the human community, it eludes human culture. Its domain is the tendency toward escape. “Deleuze and Guattari use the idea of ‘becom-ing-animal’ to describe the positivity and multiplicity

4 G.Deleuze,F.Guattari,A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis–London 2005, p. 240.

5 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 239.6 GillesDeleuze,FelixGuattari,andMarieMaclean,“Kafka:TowardaMinorLiterature:The

ComponentsofExpression,”NewLiteraryHistory,Vol.16,No.3,On Writing Histories of Literature (Spring, 1985), 599.

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of desire and affect.”7 Affect thus no longer depends on the person experiencing it. Similarly, lust is not subordi-nate to human reason. In The Cinnamon Shops we read: “Sometimes through a lapse of memory he would jump out of his chair by the table and flap his arms like wings, foaming protractedly at the mouth […]. Then, embar-rassed, he would laugh with us and try to turn the in-cident into a joke” (26). A surprising number of points in common, then! This correlation leads us toward an essential point: the father, becoming-animal, becom-ing-imperceptible, personifies the very need for distrac-tion, for dispersion, the need to go outside the self. “To get out of prison,” as Bachelard writes, quoting Hermann Hesse, “all means are good ones.”8 What kind of prison are we dealing with in The Cinnamon Shops? “Imprison-ing” convention, probability, that keeps the human be-ing confined within realism, or more narrowly, within the principles of realism.

Readers of Deleuze and Guattari will follow a different path in the course of reading The Cinnamon Shops than the one described by Włodzimierz Bolecki. Bolecki ob-serves: “Schulz sings the praises of metaphor.”9 And else-where: “Metaphor is namely in Schulz’s view a synonym of all types of ambiguity.”10 Readers of Deleuze and Guat-tari, crucially, will find in Schulz’s work the praises not of

7 C. Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, 134.8 G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 150.9 W. Bolecki, Język poetycki i proza: twórczość Brunona Schulza, [in:] Bolecki, Poetycki

model prozy w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym. Witkacy, Gombrowicz, Schulz i inni. Studium z poetyki historycznej, Kraków 1996, p. 238.

10 Bolecki, Język poetycki i proza, p. 239.

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metaphor but of metamorphosis. Metamorphosis viewed as a process that brings in its wake new styles of percep-tion. “See the world as an animal, as a series of passages going nowhere, or from the point of view of a diminishing body.”11 To be fascinated with animals is, in other words, to be fascinated with the world seen through new eyes (a change in the path of perception, a choice of pure artist-ry). “What is most artistic in us is that which is the most bestial,”12 writes Elizabeth Grosz. To be a human being and be an animal means to reject metaphor in favor of transformation. To submit to a process that is a life pas-sage and simultaneously a bold exit – an escape – from the confines of anthropocentrism; “he felt good in a bird perspective” (23).

“If I, casting aside respect for the Creator, wanted to in-dulge in a critique of creation, I would prefer for there to be less content and more form; oh, how the world’s burden would be lightened by such a lessening of moderation” (32). The apotheosis of form enunciated by the father, privileging form over content, is a relinquishment of the authority of meaning, the meaning that transforms form into concept. The concept, according to Roland Barthes, “is determined, it is at once historical and intentional.”13 To free form from meaning is to deprive it of its past. “When it becomes form, the meaning leaves its contin-gency behind; it empties itself, it becomes impoverished,

11 C. Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze, p. 138.12 E. Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, New York 2008,

p. 63.13 R. Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, New York p. 117.

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history evaporates, only the letter remains.”14 The letter that signifies the beginning of a new journey, movement in the direction of the future.

Hybrid forms – “He was fascinated by borderline forms, doubtful and problematic” (44) – are one theme of the father’s reflections. So is matter, representing possibili-ty itself, the essence of possibility, as well as potentiali-ty (the opposite of intentionality). “Deprived of her own initiative, amorously docile, femininely plastic, she sur-rendered to all of her impulses – she represents outlaw territory” (34). Matter is an anarchic space. It is not by chance that Deleuze and Guattari, critics of dialectical materialism, place becoming-imperceptible and becom-ing-animal beside becoming-woman. In doing so, gen-erally speaking, they indicate the power of attraction of what belongs to the minority, is external, excessive, other, and what threatens to disrupt the previously ex-isting order constitutive of the universal, that is, male, subject.

In Schulz’s narration, as in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, matter is equipped with the power of cre-ation. “My father was tireless in his glorification of that wondrously strange element that is matter. ‘There is no such thing as dead matter,’ he taught. ‘Death is mere-ly an appearance, which conceals unknown forms of life. The scale of these forms is infinite, and their hues and nuances inexhaustible” (35). Matter as described by

14 Barthes, Mythologies, p. 116.

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Schulz corresponds to the body without organs in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. The body without organs “is not at all a notion or a concept but a prac-tice, a set of practices. […] it is a limit.”15 It relates to the substratum that constitutes the plane of consisten-cy, an unformed, unorganized body. It brings alternative styles of being and experience. A body without organs, the French Post-Structuralists write, resembles an egg.16 The father’s penchant for bird eggs – “With a great ex-penditure of labor and money, father brought fertilized birds’ eggs back from Hamburg, from Holland, and from African zoological outposts, which he then gave to enor-mous Belgian hens for incubation” (24) – can in a cer-tain sense serve to prove his attraction to what Deleuze and Guattari term the body without organs, that which “disrupts” the human organism, violating its construc-tion, and furthermore remains in a continual process of self-creation.

The demiurge, “that great master and artist” (37), makes matter invisible, taking away its right to exist. That great master and artist introduces into the world the terror of “unattainable perfection” (35) – according to the father. And in another place: “Do you sense the pain, the desolate suffering, suppressed, the suffering trapped in matter of this shell, who does not know, why it is that it must endure in this form imposed by force, as

15 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 149–150.16 See K. Message, Body without Organs, [in:] ed. A. Parr, The Deleuze Dictionary. Revised

Edition,Edinburgh2010,pp.37−39.Seealso:G.Deleuze,F.Guattari,Anti-Oedipus, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, H.R. Lane, Minneapolis 2000, p. 19.

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a parody?” (39). Deleuze and Guattari, philosophers of the new materialism, explain: “The BwO howls: ‘They’ve made me an organism! They’ve wrongfully folded me! They’ve stolen my body!’ The judgment of God uproots it from its immanence and makes it an organism, a sig-nification, a subejct.”17 The body without organs, this stationary motor, wants to create new, independent, multitudinous forms that join opposites in themselves (the problem of the hybrid). Forms that flow into one another, forms in movement, free, asystematic, rebel-ling against the will of God (of generality). “They’ve made me an organism”– they! – those who organize the forms of life and identity! Deleuze and Guattari enable us to read the philosophy of the father in The Cinnamon Shops within the categories of the body without organs, the hybrid, matter developing into widely diverse forms of life and its many manifestations; yet the father was used to analyzing “the infinite scale of forms and shades taken on by many-shaped matter […], the astral dough at the boundary between body and spirit” (44−45) – the plane of immanence.18

17 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 157.18 “[…] because the plane of immanence is philosophical and does not immediately take

effect with concepts, it implies a sort of groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rational, or reasonable. These measures

belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess. We head for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, andwereturnwithbloodshoteyes,yettheyaretheeyesofthemind.”G.Deleuze, F,Guattari,What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson, New York 1996, p. 41.

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I truly remembered that invasion of cockroaches, that inundation of the black swarm […]. Oh, those cries of terror from father, leaping from one chair to another with a javelin in his hand. […] my father had grown completely wild (85).

As the action unfolds, we read that the father’s repug-nance to cockroaches is transfigured into fascination and fixation, resulting in radical changes to his behaviour. “He began avoiding us. He hid all day in corners, in closets, under the feather bed” (86). “The resemblance to a cock-roach became more markedly visible with each day – my father was turning into a cockroach” (86). One could as-sert that when he falls prey to a swarm of cockroaches, the father ends his existence. He ceases to exist within the register of the human. From then on, suggestively for this interpretation of the text, no human eye observes his presence (becoming-imperceptible); “Father was then no longer there” (83).

The father “returns” in the collection’s final story, in which he is confronted with people clamorously coming into his shop. The influx of the massive crowd provokes fear and aggression in him. Until suddenly: “the sky teemed with some kind of colorful rash, and scattered in undulating spots” (104) – birds, two-headed, many-winged, limping, seemingly stuffed, one-winged. In this scenery we can find birds deprived of inner life, whose energy (spirit) has transformed into various kinds of strange plumage, and the autonomous forms of their being; “those paper, blind birds could no longer have known father. […] they did not

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hear or see him” (105). That is why in the end they all perish from the blows inflicted on them by stones – dead matter. They are subject to accidents and decomposition. Dead matter absorbs them altogether. What is left to the father is return to the world of the living.

“Animals! The aim of insatiable curiosity, exemplifying life’s mysteries, as if created to show human beings to themselves” (48). In closing, there is no way to avoid devoting a few words to Nemrod, the little dog who ap-pears in the narrator’s apartment. Nemrod, a doggie bearing a proud and valiant name, in contrast to hu-manity, creates a feeling of belonging and relationali-ty for himself as he experiments with reality. He gives people a confirmation of something unlike themselves, which under the influence of diverse experiences curls up into a ball and retreats to primeval existence, pul-sating in “plasma, in [..] nerves” (49) – in feelings of fear and rage, connected with pleasure and power – opens up a primal, eternal space, making humans aware of where life develops from. It is worth underscoring here that the example of Nemrod contrasts with the birds who appear in the final scene of The Cinnamon Shops, those disembodied forms categorically cut off from life potential, from life in itself; “the cheerfulness that makes the body expand and gives birth to the need for new, sudden and risky moves – all of that seduces, con-vinces and motivates toward accepting, becoming rec-onciled with life’s experiment” (49). The body, or life, and its processes of becoming, surpassing the bound-

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aries of human concepts of freedom (the boundaries of realism), is thus one of the main themes, I find, of The Cinnamon Shops. As is the escape of the human being, who persistently seeks a way out of traditional anthro-pology.


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The short story “Spring” (Wiosna)1 plays out against a curious background. That background ensures that the element of fantasy in the story is not a mere confabu-lation, so that the reader encounters a poetry based in reality. I would like to risk extracting from the story this element wherein Bruno Schulz’s imagination takes flight, revealing the fabric on which he draws this memorable scene.

The central focal point toward which my analyses will be directed is a thing. A thing (re) and its reality, i.e., that which causes it to be and causes it to be a thing. A thing together with the space in which it exists. The title of

1 AllquotationsaretakenfromSchulz’sstory“Wiosna”(Spring)unlessotherwisenoted.Alltranslations of works quoted are my own unless otherwise noted (TWD).

Onto-theo-logy According to Bruno SchulzŁukasz Kołoczek

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Łukasz Kołoczek, Onto-theo-logy according to Bruno Schulz

my analysis refers to Martin Heidegger and his famous diagnosis of the essence of metaphysics in his essay en-titled “The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Meta-physics.”2 Read in the context of the philosopher’s later work, that diagnosis points toward the insurmountably onto-theo-logical nature of our thought (the mysterious project described in Contributions to Philosophy is also, ac-cording to my interpretation, onto-theo-logia3). It should come as no surprise, then, that the way Schulz thinks about reality has exactly such a nature. At the same time, however, the particular shape of that onto-theo-logia is unusually thought-provoking.

***There are many indications that Franz Joseph I was the Antichrist.

The Antichrist appears when the earth feels upon it the first steps of the Messiah. And the Messiah comes when time is entering into fullness. “At the time when [Franz Joseph] appeared on the world scene [...], the world had reached some happy threshold in its development.” To-gether with the Emperor and King came the fullness of time. The end of the world appears in the full ripeness of form. The world of forms that peel away, overripe forms that slip off of things, is a world that is constantly being reborn, fluid in its transformations. Franz Joseph felt this

2 M. Heidegger, The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics, [in:] Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh, Chicago 2002, pp. 42-74.

3 Ł.Kołoczek,Bóg Heideggera. Onto-teo-logiczny wymiar “Przyczynków do filozofii”, Kraków 2013.

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ripeness of the world as a danger. He himself ruled over order and harmony, who had made his domain “a world captured in the rules of prose, in the pragmatics of bore-dom.” “That demon lay down in his heaviness on things and restrained the upward flight of the world. Franz Jo-seph I filled the world with the neatly ruled lines of forms and rubrics, regulated its movement through patents, brought it under control procedurally, protected it from heading off the rails into the unanticipated, the chaot-ic, or anything wayward.” He appears to be all-powerful: “the world in those days was encircled from all sides by Franz Joseph I and there was no way of getting past him. He rose up on all horizons, from all corners emerged that ubiquitous and unavoidable profile, closing the world and locking it like a prison.”

Archduke Maximilian was the main, secret opponent of this official housekeeping, and his most serious and un-forgivable fault was that he had “rosy cheeks and radi-ant azure eyes; all hearts rushed toward him, and larks, chirping for joy, crossed his path and placed him again and again in tremulous quotation marks – a happy quo-tation, written festively in cursive and warbled gleeful-ly.” After the death of the Emperor’s brother, as a sign of mourning the color red was forbidden. Thereafter Maxi-milian’s color, red, became a recognizable sign of the frail opposition. After all, it could not be explicitly shown that even the power of a demiurge was unable to eliminate the color red from nature’s rarely visited domain. “Why, sun-light potentially contains it. You have only to close your

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eyes in the spring sun to absorb wave after wave of it un-der your eyelids.”

But it was also the color of spring. The story begins with the words: “this is the story of c a certain spring [...] that simply took seriously its literal text, that inspired man-ifesto, written in the brightest, festive red, the red of sealing-wax and calendars, the red of colored pencils and the red of enthusiasm, the amaranth of happy telegrams from over there […].” Spring is Franz Joseph’s most formi-dable enemy. This spring. Because in truth, “within each [spring] … is everything,” but “later those exaggerations and those culminations, those accumulations and ecsta-sies come into bloom,” come out into the open and take form. At the same time, that spring was being faithful to itself; it “wanted to finally become established, to explode into the world in a general and final spring.” It revolts against the harmony of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and against nature, in a “happy coup d’état.”

When spring “takes its literal text seriously,” it means that “she learns how to read it 100 different ways at once, to improvise on the spot, to syllabize in all directions.” “She reads that text backwards and forwards, losing the meaning and taking it up again, in all versions, in a thou-sand alternatives, trills and twitters. Because the text of spring is entirely labelled in speculations, in insinuations, in ellipses, marked in dots without letters on empty sky-blue, and in the free spaces between syllables birds insert their capricious speculations and their guesses.”

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The revolution of spring is thus a revolution of heresy against orthodoxy, uprising against the cosmos, a gesture of natura naturans directed toward natura naturata. And at stake in this carnage are things. Things ready to shake off their forms as those flake apart, things forced into uniformity and vulgarity.

***Spring owes its exceptionality to a revelation, which emerged “completely ready-made, fully equipped and dazzling, from Rudolf’s stamp-album.” A revelation, meaning “a vision suddenly revealed of the blazing beauty of the world” connected to a message, a mission relating to “uncaptured possibilities of being.” “Vivid, ferocious and breath-taking horizons appeared on the door-post, the world trembled and flickered at its joints, leaned for-ward dangerously, threatening to break away from all limits and rules.” The revelation contained an order de-claring war against the despot who had sat down on the whole world. The stamp-album was the book containing a procession of creatures not subject to the Emperor. “The world manifested as a thousand arms, flags, and banners raised to swear an oath, manifested as a thousand voices, of allegiance not to Franz Joseph I, but to someone much, much greater.”

Who is that someone? He is the Messiah that the sto-ry entitled “The Brilliant Epoch” (Genialna epoka) tells about: “On that day the Messiah comes even to the shore of the horizon and looks at the earth from over there.

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And when he sees it thus white and quiet with its sky-blues and musings, it can happen, that the boundary will be lost in his eyes, the bluish stripes of the clouds will lie down beneath him as a passageway and without knowing himself what he is doing, he will come down on to Earth. And Earth in its reverie will not even notice the one who has come down on to her roads and people will awaken from their afternoon nap and not remember anything. All of history will thus be obliterated and it will be as it was in time immemorial, before history be-gan” (“The Brilliant Epoch,” III).

The narrator of “The Brilliant Epoch” does not tell about the coming of the Messiah as if it were something he sees in a prophetic vision. The phrase “on that day” means: beyond official time, beyond the reach of the Emperor’s rule. Józef – the one in “The Brilliant Epoch” – experienc-es that earlier, before the arrival of spring. “It was toward the end of winter. [...] – I have always told you that ev-erything is obstructed, walled off by boredom, repressed. And now, look, what an overflow, what a blossoming of everything, what bliss…” (“The Brilliant Epoch,” II). This experience of abundance in spite of total obstruc-tion must be a result of that unseen step by the Messiah outside the boundary of his sphere. For the Messiah does not belong to the domain of the demiurge, to the area of what is arranged in conformity with order. The Messiah is the demiurge’s opponent, the opponent not of a cre-ator but of a craftsman, who creates according to patterns and rules. Józef, affected by the coming of the Messiah,

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begins to draw, turning out one drawing after another, in an inspired and uncommonly prolific state. “With ev-ery passing hour, visions arose in ever greater numbers, they swarmed and crowded space, until one day all the roads and paths teemed and flowed in processions, and the whole country branched out in wanderings, dispersed into lengthening parades – endless pilgrimages of beasts and animals” (ibidem).

When later the petty thief whom Józef is telling about the Messiah sees these drawings that have arisen in panic and ecstasy, he says: “You might say [...] that the world went through your hands, that it might dally there and shed its skin like a magical lizard” (“The Brilliant Epoch,” IV). And still later, when he held Adela’s slippers in his hand and, in a messianic gesture, took them with him, he speaks a truly Talmudic wisdom: “The six days of cre-ation were divine and clear. But on the seventh day, he felt an alien thread under his hands and, horrified, took his hands from the world, though his creative fervor was supposed to last for many more days and nights. O, Józef, beware the seventh day…” (ibidem). The seventh day is the day, when God happened on the Messiah and took his hands off creation. This is the knowledge that Shloma an-nounces, limping slightly as he leaves– for he has wrestled with Jahweh and come away from that oppressive strug-gle victorious. Liberation from the rule of the demiurge is possible, but only under the condition that one joins the messianic sect.

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The figure of the Messiah refers back to a primeval myth, which Schulz retells in his own words. This myth also featured in the teachings of Marcion, a Christian here-siarch of the second century C.E., who saw in Jahweh, the God of the Old Testament, a mighty, evil demiurge, and in Jesus of Nazareth a Messiah, not the vengeful warrior foretold by the prophets, however– but the messenger of a good God, albeit one wholly alien to Jewish tradition and scriptures.4

This conflict between God and Messiah organizes Schulz’s way of thinking about things. One cannot sim-ply say about a thing that it exists. Rather, things hap-pen within the framework of this divine controversy: submitting to the power of the demiurge, they arrange themselves in an orderly fashion, fitting snugly into the appropriate drawers and compartments, their forms be-coming smooth and stretching around the whole unruly element hidden in them. But when the fullness of time comes, as probably happens on sunny afternoons, the Messiah crosses the boundary of his transcendence and makes forms peel off of things, so that creative chaos peeks out from them.

***If the whole controversy deals with things, then what are they? Can their essence be expressed? Can their existence

4 On the subject of Marcion and St. Paul in the context of messianism, see Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul (Cultural Memory in the Present), trans. Dana Hollander, Stanford 2003, pp. 55-62, 131-133. Taubes states, citing a book by Theodosius Harnack (Luthers Theologie,Erlangen1862),thatMarcionexertedapowerfulinfluenceonmodernthough, particularly on Luther.

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be removed from its shell? A thing like a stamp-album might appear to be an ordinary thing, not worth a sec-ond look. But this spring makes out of ordinary things something extraordinary. Or, better: it shows the hidden dimension of ordinary things, the dimension that in the moment of its revelation teras the thing out of its ordi-nariness and makes it an exceptional thing.

Spring reveals its deeper nature at twilight.

“Have we reached the heart of the matter? [...]? We are at the end of our words, which here become delirious, non-sensical and irresponsible.” No, there is one more step that is required! A step into the mystery of twilight. “Only beyond our words, where the power of our magic does not reach, does that dark, ungraspable element rustle.” Let us enter the deep. “What do you mean, into the deep? We understand that quite literally.” “When the roots of the trees want to speak, when a great quantity of the past has gathered under the sod, old stories, prehistoric histories, when under the roots there accumulate too many panting whispers, unarticulated pulp and that breathless darkness that comes before a great word [...] then we are suddenly at the goal, on the other side of things [...].” In the deep “internal labyrinths, storehouses and granaries of things” branch out. Things shrouded in history and myth. “At the lining of things”– “the swarm and pulp, peoples and gen-erations, bibles and iliads multiplied thousands of times over,” “everything we have ever read, all stories we have heard and all those that we have dreamt since childhood

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– without ever hearing about them– here, and nowhere else, is their house and fatherland.”

***And what is spring in relation to that? Spring is the ele-ment that plays out in between the deep and the world. Between what is above, beyond the roots, and what is surging in the ground (“Because it’s only on top– it must be said once and for all– that we are a palpitating, artic-ulated cluster of melodies [...] – in the deep we scatter back into black murmuring, into the din, the multitude of unfinished stories”). Spring calls things forth from black forgetfulness toward the light (“For what is spring, if not the resurrection of stories”). It brings myths to life. But these stories in the lining do not exist in articulated form; they are rather heavy rumblings, “shapeless stalks, asymmetrical hulking forms,” they are “obscure texts.” Spring brings them out toward the light, toward the word. The obscure pulp of myth becomes exposed at its roots, but in that light is revealed not merely at the roots but with its green branches, young and unaware of its antiq-uity. Hitherto unarticulated history reaches the level of the word and spins itself as a new story, oblivious to the fact that it has been told an infinite number of times, but in different words.

Spring is an element that separates out the black depth of unarticulated stories and the world of manifest things, and assigns them to each other. These two poles of spring stand in opposition to each other. Spring – this element

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spitting out of itself both extremes – keeps them in the distance, almost in separation, rendering the one so dis-tant and obscure that it becomes mythical and fantasti-cal, while revealing the other in so literal a fashion that it appears to be the only true reality. This happens every spring. But that one spring, that “was truer, more dazzling and vivid than other springs,” disclosed the hidden side of its nature. A nature that involves not only maintain-ing the distance between earth and world, but also main-taining the two extremes in unity. Only the dark side of spring – the side that is revealed at twilight – allows us to experience and discover the “abyssal” dimension of the reality of things. Myth is thus shown to be a fundamental part of reality; reality lurks in myth.

Spring – this element in between myth and reality – in this exceptional case, that is, this spring that “took its lit-eral text seriously,” becomes populated by creatures who have abandoned their previously existing real dimension: Józef, Blanka, Rudolf’s stamp-album, and by creatures who have abandoned their previously existing mythical dimension: Mr. de V., the archduke, and the army of wax figures. But does this crossing of boundaries and join-ing together of the mythical-real community, the hu-man-non-human collective, herald the existence of a new quality, neither merely fantastical nor merely real? There is room for doubt, for Schulz’s story is a fantastical tale, and it therefore seems located entirety in the realm of myth. This exceptional spring is thus also mythical, as is that black abyss full of myths plunged between the roots.

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Another thing that is mythical – if we agree that the sto-ry is just a fairy tale – is the world of Schulz’s narration. Mythical, and thus lacking reality. Stamp-albums outside of the story are simply stamp-albums, and wax figures nothing but wax figures.

But that is only true if the story is read in the context of a reality that has been separated entirely from myth. The reader, submerged utterly in the domain of the demiurge, cannot escape from that domain and if he is allowed to read this fairy tale at all, then it is strictly as a fairy tale. At the same time, I am making an attempt to “take seri-ously the literal text” of Spring. And it is my conviction that that signifies a fundamental revaluation: a relin-quishment of the status of reality accorded to what is only the real pole of spring, and the relocation of reality in the event of spring itself, that is, in that sphere between the merely-mythical and the merely-real. In my reading, the plot of the story is real, while a tobacco shop in the Aus-tro-Hungarian Empire is revealed to be an abstraction of reality, the result of a process of displacement of reality’s fictional foundation. In this reading the everyday realm saturated with common sense is not real at all and cannot be the measure for deciding what is real and what is not. It is rather the husk of reality – a shell whose essence has escaped.

The story is thus not a pure confabulation, but a way of protecting the reality inside a thing. In other words, it signals toward the truth that every street-organ from

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Schwarzwald, though it play the same melody, is a refuge for personal stories, or that a stamp-album is capable not only of revealing the totalizing mechanisms that create our everyday world, but also of opposing them, using the mythology it carries concealed within itself.

***Spring is the time of revolution, and spring is the dispute between earth and world. What is spring, if it is both the battleground of demiurge and Messiah, and of earth and world? Is it, in fact, a thing – a thing among other things? We are inclined to say no. But if it is not something, then what is it? And if it is something, then how? How can we think the spring described by Schulz?

The fourth chapter of the story begins with the following reflections:

I understood then why that spring had thus far been so empty, hollow, and barren. Without knowing it was doing so, it had subsided within itself, gone silent, re-treated into the deep – made a space, opened itself up to pure space, empty sky-blue without opinion and without definition – an astonished, naked form for receiving unknown content. Hence that sky-blue neutrality, as if awoken from a dream, that great and, as it were, indifferent readiness for everything. That spring held itself in preparedness – desolate and ca-pacious, it presented itself at our disposal, madly out of breath – it was waiting, in short, for a revelation.

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Nothing in this description matches our common expe-rience of this time of year. Why does it subside within itself? Why does it go silent? Does it really retreat into the deep, into the earth, spring – the time of regeneration and sprouting up from the earth?

But perhaps spring is anticipation of things to come. It is “an astonished, naked form,” which does not peel off of things at all, because it is anterior to things. It therefore has no predilection toward any particular thing. Spring is indifferent to the content that arises within her. “In-different readiness for everything.” But in this indifferent readiness she abides in preparedness, presenting itself at our disposal.

Clearly someone like Józef is needed, who brings to that anticipation the contribution of his stamp-album – per-haps not expecting the result – and emancipates spring from its emptiness, into the abundance of creation. Józef – hero of “The Brilliant Epoch” – is necessary, to catch, “tense like a bow,” his “splendid drawings” from this space as it changes colors on sheets of printed paper.

But spring thus becomes used, dragged down to the lev-el of a thing, and finally mistaken for one. That is the punchline of “Spring.” When Józef’s intentions begin to waver, he sighs: “Ah, something is rotting and shattering in the heart of spring.” In the end, Józef realizes that he has gone too far: “I imposed my own direction on that spring, I put my own program underneath her unbound

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efflorescence and wanted to bend her, to steer her ac-cording to my own plans.” Spring demands the poet lis-ten intently, but she will not be abused; she demands he harmonize in readiness, but not that he step over into megalomania.

***It is natural for my thoughts to return to those texts of Heidegger’s, in which the thing appears in the context of the Rectangle: gods, mortals, heaven and earth.5 That figure, though divergent in some details, also appears in Schulz. Of course it does not appear directly; the idea is not unambiguously articulated. Nonetheless it consti-tutes – as I have already stated – the background on which Schulz’s stories are drawn. Of the essence is that empty spaciousness that withdraws into itself; it is not an area left unobstructed by things, but is readiness and stand-ing at our disposal. That spaciousness occurs in between deep-rooted, unarticulated myths and the light-struck world of articulated melodies. It also occurs in between the age-old battle of demiurge and Messiah and people, who basically sleep through their lives in an afternoon nap, but sometimes a few of them experience dazzlement and enact one of their scenarios on this stage ready for every kind of form.

The Heideggerian problem of onto-theo-logy is related above all to the grounding of being. Heidegger finds that metaphysical thinking about being always grounds be-

5 See e.g. Martin Heidgger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller, Amherst 2000; The Way to Language, [in:] Heidegger, Basic Writings, New York 2008, pp. 393-427.

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ing in two ways: firstly, in general, and secondly, in what is highest. The infirmity of metaphysics lies in the fact that it never thinks both ways of grounding in their uni-ty, never asks about what is shared between them. The poetic thought of Schulz experiences that unity in the form of spring, that is, in the element that gives things meaning.


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Writing in the Guardian, Lyn Gardner proclaimed that in her 20 years of going to the theater, seeing thousands of plays, it was the images created onstage by Complicite that stayed in her memory. Gardner is also the author of prob-ably the shortest, and certainly the most eloquent defini-tion of Complicite. Asked by a friend from Peru who had never heard of the group, “What is Complicite?” Gardner answered: “It’s why I go to the theater.”

So what does Complicite have to do with Bruno Schulz? Here some elaboration of Gardner’s definition and ex-planation of the group’s genesis and artistic principles seems crucial. The group was formed in London in 1983 by Annabel Arden, Simon McBurney, and Marcello Mag-

Schulz According to Complicite. Instability, Metamorphosis, and Fluidity Anna Suwalska-Kołecka

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Anna Suwalska-Kołecka, Schulz According to Complicite...

ni, under the name Théâtre de Complicité. The name it-self was gradually simplified until it became the currently functioning Complicite. The French pedigree of the name appears to be inspired by the founders’ having graduat-ed from the Parisian theatrical school of Jacques Lecoq, who exerted tremendous influence on their theatrical philosophy. Lecoq stressed the actor’s imagination and creativity in order to thereby free him from the tyranny of the text. Through pantomime and improvisation, he sought to bring out the physical aspect of performance, as he believed that the actor’s body, not the text, is the key generator of meaning in the theatre. Lecoq developed three basic skills in his students: playfulness, complicité (involvement) and openness.1 His students in the Com-plicite group have scrupulously maintained those skills, astonishing audiences worldwide for over 30 years with performances that present a unique interaction of text, movement, and visual and sound effects.

The group’s repertoire includes theatrical adaptations of prose works, contemporary interpretations of the classics, and original works developed in workshops by the collec-tive, not to mention what they have been showing recent-ly: multimedia performances incorporating contemporary technology innovatively.

1 Among others, Maria Shevstova and Christopher Innes write about this in The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing, Cambridge 2013, p. 221. One of the latest works on Lecoq is Simon Murray’s Jacques Lecoq, London 2003, in which a whole chapter is devoted to Complicite’s The Street of Crocodiles as an example of collaborative theatre inspired by the Frenchteacher.Lecoq’sLecorpspoètique,writteninthelastyearsofhislife,waspublishedin English as The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre, trans. David Hanby, New York 2002.

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Though Complicite’s repertoire includes classics from Shakespeare to Ionesco, it is the company’s dramatic ad-aptations of prose works previously seen as unstageable that have established its renown and astonished critics on both sides of the Atlantic. The group’s first venture into this type of production, and thus a breakthrough in its history, was the production of The Street of Croc-odiles inspired by the two collections of Bruno Schulz’s short stories, The Cinnamon Shops and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass as well as Schulz’s biography. Presented in a co-production with the National Theatre in London in August 1992, the play was revived twice, in 1994 and, with a new cast, in 1998. It was seen by audi-ences on many continents, in such cities as Sydney, To-kyo, Moscow, Wrocław, Jerusalem, Montreal, New York and Barcelona, and showered with awards by critics.2 The Complicite anthology volume Plays: 1 lists, alongside cast and crew, the people and institutions that have made the production possible. A special place among them belongs to Jakub Schulz, to whom thanks are offered on the book’s dedication page. As Simon McBurney and Mark Wheat-ley write in the preface, Jakub described his uncle to them and thus helped them find the connection between the present and the living past.3

The dedication to Jakub Schulz and the long list of peo-ple involved in the entire undertaking indicate the truly collective process through which the group’s productions

2 A full record of all of the festivals at which Crocodile Streets was performed, and a list of all the awards it received, can be found in: Complicite, Plays: 1, London 2003, pp. 6–7.

3 Complicite, Plays: 1, p. 4.

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take shape. Though director and artistic director Simon McBurney and writer Mark Wheatley are seen as respon-sible for the adaptation of Schulz’s prose, the play is the fruit of the entire group’s work.4 This is both a tribute to the master, Lecoq, and the enactment of a fundamen-tal principle encoded in the name complicité – involve-ment. It encompasses both the process of collaboration among the creators of the play while they are preparing it, and the process of collaboration with the audience, who co-create the meaning of a play with the cast on any given night.

In describing how they work on a play, McBurney and Wheatley invoke the example of adapting Schulz’s prose: since it does not follow a traditional narrative pattern, the group’s work entailed more invention than adaptation. To bring the reader closer to the source that provided the artists’ inspiration for particular scenes, the scenes were sprinkled with quotations from Schulz’s stories. In addi-tion to these quotations, they made use of the author’s letters and essays, as well as reminiscences provided by Jakub. In improvising, they attempted to activate memo-ry processes, which play a crucial role in his work, in or-der to feel the atmosphere of his era, to surrender to the mechanics of his dreams and the rhythm of his night-mares. Out of that reading, these improvisations, and the arguments they prompted, a book was formed which, in the authors’ view, presents rather a record of the process

4 E. Govan, H. Nicholson, K. Normington, Making a Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices, Oxon–New York 2007, p. 99.

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than a text or a road map that presents a choice of possi-ble routes.5

Robert Butler describes the rehearsals for The Street of Crocodiles, in which he participated, in a tone of un-equivocal amazement and disbelief. Three weeks before opening night, the actors do not have lines prepared, only quotations written out on cream-colored cue cardscards, which can (but don’t have to) serve as the inspiration for a series of improvisations. He observes how a fami-ly having lunch together gradually become transformed, together with the table and chairs, into steps leading to the attic, into a balustrade, into a flock of birds, only to return to the table with their cackling and flutter of wings replaced by the scraping of a spoon against a soup-dish. The sequence is repeated multiple times over the course of an hour, until complete fluidity of movement has been achieved. He declares that where other actors learn how to deliver their lines without falling over the furniture, the actors of Complicite practice how to turn into furniture. What impresses Butler most is the fact that this spirit of artistic anarchy came to reign over the National Theatre in London, whose long administrative corridors demand advance warning about whatever happens on their stage.6

The recording of those rehearsals lets us hear the views of McBurney, director of most of Complicite’s plays: “A piece

5 S. McBurney, M. Wheatley, Note on the Script, in Complicite, Plays: 1, pp. 4–5.6 R. Butler, Just don’t bump into the actors: Theatre de Complicite make it up as they go

along, all the way to an Olivier Award, The Independent, 2.08.1992, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre--just-dont-bump-into-the-actors-theatre-de-complicite-make-it-up-as-they-go-along-all-the-way-to-an-olivier-award-robert-butler-follows-them-1537729.html [accessed 10.09.2015]..

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of theatre is, ultimately, in the hands of those who are performing it. The actors. It is they not the director who must have the whole piece in their every gesture, hearing the meaning in each word. And to do that I think, as an actor, you have to feel that you possess the piece. And to possess the piece you have to be part of its creation. In-volved intimately in the process of its making.”7

Ric Knowles uses the words “questioning” and “collabora-tive” to describe both the training that the actors undergo and their work in preparing a play.8 This refers not only to the physical and conceptual effort of a play’s co-cre-ation, as discussed above, but also a number of activities undertaken toward the goal of penetrating the very es-sence of the subject matter. The group conducts research and gathers material relating to the play it is working on with surprising thoroughness, and The Street of Crocodiles was no exception in this regard. Wiśniewski reports that in Complicite’s archive, in addition to correspondence conducted in the course of research into Schulz’s life and work, there are also English summaries of Polish scholarly works on the subject.9

The result of these intensive preparations is a play that, according to critical consensus, conveys the Schulz universe, undulating and pulsating with the inscruta-ble rhythm of creeping metamorphoses. The audience

7 S.McBurney,“OnDirecting.”TheatreSalpuri:InterCulturalTheaterLabour, http://www.theater-salpuri.de/sites/default/files/pdf/on_directing.pdf[accessed10.09.2015].

8 R. Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre, Cambridge 2004, p. 48.9 T.Wiśniewski,“PoezjascenywteatrzeComplicite:przykładUlicyKrokodyliwedług

BrunonaSchulza”,Tekstualia 1(28)/2012, pp. 60–61.

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responded with rapture and amazement to the actors’ ability, despite being trapped in their own bodies, to bring to life on stage what one critic called “a rest-less ocean of unending flux” in which “[s]hadow and substance bleed and intermingle, and even the most fixed-seeming forms refuse to hold onto their shapes.”10

The play has a sharply defined compositional frame, with the prologue and epilogue taking place on November 19, 1942 in Drohobych, the date and place of Schulz’s death. In the prologue, Joseph is doing some work assigned to him by the Nazis in a warehouse on the outskirts of Drohobych. He is sorting books, marking those that contradict the Fascist ideology for destruction. Orders heard being giv-en in German in the distance add an ominous note to the scene, as does the sound of troops marching, foreshadow-ing the story’s tragic dénouement. As Joseph catalogues the books and arranges them in piles, he is unable to resist their power. He picks up and reads from one, sniffing the scent of its pages. The book’s smell and feel stir sensations that take him back to the world of childhood memories and thus develop as the play’s internal action. It is curious to note that this compositional shape is based on the struc-ture of Schulz’s The Cinnamon Shops, consisting of the narrator-protagonist’s retrospective return to the days of his childhood. This form is to some extent the catalyst of multifarious deformations of reality, whose elements the child’s memory magnifies or shrinks.

10 B.Brantley,“AHauntingVisionUntaintedbyOrderorLogic,”The New York Times, 18.07.1998, http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/18/theater/festival-review-theater-a-haunting-vision-untainted-by-order-or-logic.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm [accessed 16.10.2015].

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/18/theater/festival-review-theater-a-haunting-vision-untainted-by-order-or-logic.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/18/theater/festival-review-theater-a-haunting-vision-untainted-by-order-or-logic.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

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Here it is instructive to consider a statement by Jarzębski, who defined the fundamental aspect of Schulz’s prose thus: “When we say that something ‘happens’ in the world of Schulz’s stories, we are at the same time aware of the ambi-guity that accompanies this formulation, since the plots of the stories do not always permit us to differentiate what are facts external to the protagonist’s consciousness and what are his fantastic daydreams or visions […] The protagonist creates his world no less than he cognizes it.”11 And the same thing takes place in Complicite’s stage presentation; the initial stage directions of The Street of Crocodiles, for ex-ample inform us that “the cast gradually appear on stage as if called up by Joseph’s imagination,”12 so that this opening scene already bears the mark of Schulz’s phantasmagorical ambiance. Family members and workers practically come popping out of the stage scenery, defying the laws of phys-ics: one of Father’s helpers comes walking along the wall at a right angle to the audience, another emerges by flowing out of a small bucket standing on the floor, while Maria the maid steps out of a box of books. Karol, Emil and Agata ap-pear from behind bookcases, while Mother slides across the stage on her knees with a book wrapped in a scarf. At that point Father appears, discoursing about forgotten rooms left unvisited for several months and revealed to be over-grown with grass and trees that burst magnificently into bloom before his eyes, only to then surrender to the pro-cesses of disintegration and decay. The next morning, no trace of the trees remain and Father concludes that it must have been a mirage that merely resembled living forms.

11 J.Jarzębski,Wstęp [in:] B. Schulz, Opowiadania. Wybór esejów i listów,Wrocław1989,p.XX.12 Complicite, Plays: 1, p. 11.

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This description demonstrates how the text refers to its Schulzian original in an open, non-literal way; it shows the protagonist’s house with its innumerable rooms and also captures their unparalleled, expanded vitality. In “A Treatise on Mannequins” (Traktat o manekinach) the narrator speaks of the incomparable luxuriance of flo-ra and fauna that materialize in apartments to feed on both dreams and the barrenness of boredom within those walls. After a period of effusive growth and flourishing there inevitably comes decomposition and petrification.

In addition to this recurring series of references, the play also features a distinct attempt to create a reality with a similar degree of ontological frustration. There is no way to distinguish the dream from the waking world; it is impossible to draw a boundary between what is real and what is imagined. Reality is in a state of permanent instability, matter seems to seethe beneath an outwardly stable form, ready at any moment to fluidly change shape. Space is marked by a frankly unusual plasticity, shrink-ing and stretching out, undergoing an endless process of transformation. Similarly, time can either speed up or slow down, get tied up in knots or branch out into side-streams. The oneiric nature of Schulz’s imagery is very much on display in Complicite’s The Street of Crocodiles. Here the principles of reality’s creation are also subject to the mechanics of the dream, breaking away from both chronological sequence and the logic of cause and ef-fect. The play is composed of a series of loosely connect-ed scenes, in which the flow of action is disrupted by the

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common reference point of Joseph’s psyche, as he sleeps and remembers his childhood.

The most spectacular aspect in Complicite’s performance is perhaps this attempt to convey the fluidity of Schulz’s universe. Many critics agree that there is a direct link with the abundance of Schulz’s poetic language, with its proliferation of metaphors, epithets, and hyperbole. In Jarzębski’s words, “this aesthetic of excess”13 allows suc-cessive, new fluid and whimsical incarnations to be uncov-ered in its metamorphoses of things. One device Schulz frequently uses is turning inanimate objects, natural phe-nomena or abstract concepts into living creatures. In the story “August” (Sierpień), windows, blinded by the sun “sleep,” sunflowers are in (yellow) mourning, and the vi-vacity of the garden unrestrainedly seizes the earth with “ebullient tongues of fleshy verdure.” In the “Treatise on Mannequins,” lamps “wither” and hang dejectedly, while the narrator, unable to stir himself into action, lies “on the furry belly of darkness.” One can get the impression that all objects are endowed with the functions of life, like the furniture, chairs and cabinets that suffer the agony of crucifixion and staining in the “Treatise,” to name only one set of examples. Curiously, at the same time, animate creatures take on the features of surrounding objects, such as for example in the description of the sufferings of the furniture grouped around Father, where the lines of wrin-kles on his face begin to resemble the knots and rings in wood, and stiffen, for a moment becoming like the surface

13 J.Jarzębski,Wstęp,p.XXXIII.

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of a wooden board. On the stage, matter likewise trembles and pulsates with its own rhythm, yielding to a series of transformations. In a scene inspired by the problems just discussed, chairs lifted up become a forest, and a piece of timber dropped by Emil on the floor bounces back and lands in his hands.14 Not only do members of the fami-ly turn into birds, but so do books, fluttering their pages like wings, floating upward and flying before the eyes of dumbfounded audience members. Just as a train looms out of the twilight into the midst of streets in Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, so during the play the characters use their chairs to form train compartments, and their words recreate the rhythmic clatter of the locomotive’s wheels. During a sequence of scenes based on the story “The Gale” (Wichura ), tables move, seemingly animated by a magic breath of life, and a gust of wind removes the tablecloth, snatching it with the hand left behind by Father as Emil and Karol wrestle with it and the fabric bellies out like a sail. When Father sums up the changes taking place, his lines strike tones highly reminiscent of Schulz: “Matter can change in an instant, Joseph. [...] In the wink of an eye we may no longer be who we think we are.”15

In Complicite’s stage production we also see Schulz’s ten-dency to turn human beings into animals; as in the orig-inal text, here too this is mainly true of Father. He goes through a series of transformations on stage, from a fly to a condor, to a puppet with wooden limbs.

14 Complicite, Plays: 1, p. 19.15 Complicite, Plays: 1, p. 39.

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With all of these devices, the resulting play has been de-scribed by more than one observer as “Polish” in form, like something directly out of Tadeusz Kantor’s imagina-tion, where the physical swirls next to the metaphysical and unreal on the stage, attempting in this oneiric dance of despair to summon back irretrievably lost moments and people.16

Markowski has written about how in Schulz’s prose, re-ality bears the marks of a theatrical spectacle that, in joining together real and artificial elements, beckons us toward an unusual kind of sensual perception.17 To go fur-ther down this path, we might note that the Schulz uni-verse is inherently reminiscent of the theatrical sign, de-scribed by the Prague Structuralists as dynamic, mobile, and variable, extraordinarily capacious in its potential for generating meanings.18 We have but to recall the Hamlet directed by Peter Brook, in which lusciously colored satin pillows functioned as both castle walls and banquet ta-ble. “The effect of theatricality becomes manifest in the ‘shimmering’ or oscillation of all elements presented on the stage: it is alternately real and fictional.”19

Complicite, using a whole arsenal of theatrical tools, cap-tures this theatrical mutability of Schulz’s prose, in which not only forms and shapes fluidly pass into each other,

16 I. Shuttleworth, The Street of Crocodiles, http://www.cix.co.uk/~shutters/reviews/99002.htm, 9.12.2013 [accessed 10.9.2015].

17 M. P. Markowski, Text and Theatre. The Ironic Imagination of Schulz, [in:] D. de Bruyn, K. Heuckelom, ed., Unmasking Bruno Schulz, Amsterdam–New York 2009, p. 435.

18 K. Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, London–New York 1997, pp. 12–16.19 J. Limon, Trzy teatry,Gdańsk2003,p.76.

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but also, in keeping with the oneiric mechanics of dreams, ontological spheres interpenetrate each other. The con-figuration of characters combines with the dynamics of the stage set to create a flight of stairs, multiple levels in a house, and a train rushing rhythmically forward on the rails. The actors, making use of the semiotic poten-tial of objects on stage and ordinary elements of the set such as chairs and tables, create first a dining-room, then a classroom, and then Father’s shop. Spectators watch as whirring coils of material change into the undulating wa-ters of the ocean, thus bringing the reams of fabric lying on the floor to phantasmagoric life. Ben Brantley writes: “I’ve never seen such a distinctive, purely literary voice so closely approximated in a piece of theater. Schulz’s work, like that of Proust and Kafka, shakes readers free of the blinkers of habitual perception. This production, against all odds, achieves the same effect […].”20

Simon McBurney is reckoned to be one of the 12 most in-fluential theatre directors in the world, and Complicite is considered a group that has shown how the theatre’s possibilities can be expanded and thereby provided an ex-ample for others to follow. Christopher Innes, author of what is probably the most exhaustive study of contempo-rary British theatre and drama, finds that McBurney “rep-resents an on-going search for the kinds of meaning that will both reflect and express contemporary consciousness, leading into the new millennium.”21 This adaptation of Schulz’s prose formed the beginning of a series of works

20 BenBrantley,“AHauntingVision.”21 Ch. Innes, Modern British Theatre, Cambridge 2002, p. 543.

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whose aim was to express the transitoriness of human re-membrance and deepen the mechanics of memory. The creators of the production found images in Schulz that enabled them to put their artistic principles into action in the fullest possible way; in his work, they discovered the sense of loss and abandonment that constitutes an in-tegral part of the contemporary sensibility. The rupture in continuity between the past and the present, the loss of contact with what has passed away, a peculiar fracture that typifies the human being in today’s world. But which can, in McBurney’s view, be transcended. It can be tran-scended with the help of what takes place in the theatre in between the stage and the seats in the house.22 Schulz is part of that process of communication.


22 McBurney,M.Wheatley,“Prologue,”inComplicite,Plays: 1, pp. x-xii.

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[…] your new friend Pan pulls out a bottle of white wine hidden inside the stump, uncorks it and offers you a root cigar. What an importunate babbler! But as time passes by, tireless in your invention, jabber-ing, and fantasizing, you begin to see unfolding above yourselves clusters of apparitions, as you hallucinate together the starry beyond, white milky ways, laby-rinths of unfinished colosseums and forums. Without your even noticing, the night air descends over the garden, this black Proteus who for his amusement

Bruno Schulz – Digitally. The Internet Gamebook Idol and the Future of Schulz Adaptations on the Computer Screen Mariusz Pisarski

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Mariusz Pisarski, Bruno Schulz – Digitally...

forms condensed velvet, streaks of jasmine scent, cas-cades of ozone, sudden airless solitudes growing like black spheres into infinity, monstrous grapes of dark-ness, overflowing with dark juice.

You become conscious that it is time to go, that there are tasks in this city worth performing. […]

1. You take a look around 2. You return to the town square.

The above quotation is one of over 100 textual cut-ups that together comprise Idol (Bałwochwał), a digital adaptation of Bruno Schulz’s stories published on the Ha!art website as an “internet gamebook.” The simian hunchback Pan, with his “hands in his tattered trousers,” is familiar from Schulz’s The Cinnamon Shops. But the white wine and root cigar we encounter rather in “The Dead Season” (Martwy sezon) in Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. The hallucinatory content of the main paragraph comes almost verbatim from the story “July Night” (Nocy lipcowa) and is a sort of remix of a longer account (running two pages) of the wanderings of personified night through a sleep-ing Drohobych. And what about the trunk where Pan has been hiding the bottle? That was added during the pro-cess of adaptation, a plot detail thrown in to embellish the description, though the space itself certainly allows for such a growth: the libation shared with the faun takes place in a dark, abandoned part of the garden, described by Schulz as being tangled with “thickly overgrown with

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grasses, weeds, and thistles.” Most importantly, however, the Drohobych master’s narrative has been transported from first to second person singular, by this violent, per-haps iconoclastic shift introducing the work of the great writer into a) the space of digital writing and b) into the age of the culture of participation.1

It takes only a short reconstruction of the source ma-terial to see that what we are dealing with here is not postmodernist re-writing, nor mere digitalization as commonly understood. The author of this derivative text is neither Pierre Menard from the Borges story, writ-ing Don Quijote out again word for word, nor Professor Marek Adamiec, who since the late 1990s has been build-ing a virtual library of Polish literature online. I would further hope that the text does not represent a form of karaoke, about which Dobravka Ugrešić writes in Ka-raoke Culture, a dramatic diatribe against contempo-rary culture.2 As karaoke, Idol would have to exhibit the adaptor-authors’ voices at the expense of Schulz’s voice, which according to Ugrešić’s criteria, would be taken down from its pedestal in the canon to yield the field to anonymous representatives of globalized “low” culture. Aside from the fact that the protagonist of Idol is not Józio, but rather “you,” the work still demands – both

1 AnageinauguratedbysuchgesturesasTimemagazine’sselectionofthecollective“YOU,”meaning the many millions among the ranks of the internet users, as Person of the Year. On the cover of that issue there was a picture of a computer screen with the following words underneath:“Yes,you.Youcontroltheinformationage.Welcometoyourworld.”Formoreon participatory culture, see H. Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York 2006.

2 D.Ugrešić,Karaoke Culture, Rochester 2011.

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from the author of the adaptation and its reader – what for Robert Coover is one of the last markers of litera-ture in the age of advancing multiplication of competing narrative forms: attention, concentration, quiet. Coover urges us, “Calm down and read…” – and the message of Idol should echo that advice.3

Genre and Typological Concerns Relating to IdolAs an adaptation into a different medium, Idol can be placed next to previous adaptations into film (Wojciech Jerzy Has’s 1973 Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hour-glass) or animation (the Quay brothers’ 1986 Street of Crocodiles). Any such comparison, however, quickly re-veals it to be a unique adaptation, privileged in being closer to the original. From the various functions of the computer as a “metamedium,” Idol employs chiefly the textual aspect and operates by means of a linguistic code, in fact the same code in which the original was written. Many passages in the work, particularly impersonal de-scriptions, are taken straight from Schulz. Nonetheless, the secondary text is never semiotically identical to the source text. The introduction of an alternative naviga-tional apparatus, the application of mechanisms of ran-dom content-generation by means of multiple links by whose activation the game player advances to one of sev-eral possible continuations,4 tossing digital dice to decide the outcome of a mini-game, chatting with the conductor

3 R. Coover, The End of Literature, unpublished manuscript, 2012, correspondence with the author.

4 Forexample,choosing“Examinethecontentsofthestampalbum”inthe“City”segmentleads to three different possible sequences; see Bałwochwał, developed by M. Pisarski, M. Bylak, http://ha.art.pl/schulz/miasto_w.html [accessed 01.01.2013].

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at a railway station or, finally, the soundtrack accompa-nying many of the locations, all mean that the scope of Idol is decidedly expanded by the “freedoms” of the dig-ital medium. This hybrid creation, part fan fiction, part Cortazarian hopscotch with the original, and part textu-al gamebook with its own rules, shows the vertiginously thrilling adaptive potential of the computer metamedi-um. There can be as many digital adaptations of Bruno Schulz’s works as there are authors who undertake to write one, and each of them will draw to a different degree from the multimedia palette of technical and typological or genre methods and devices available to them. Such an adaptation may take the form of a chatbot, i.e., a dialogue with a machine’s “artificial intelligence,” or a multi-level game à la SuperMario, an archive-themed hypertext in which the reader is tasked with moving agilely through the fictionalized archives of Bruno Schulz, or even– if the budget for the project is millions of dollars high – an in-ternet game on the model of MMORPG, in which players compete in an alternative, three-dimensional, graphi-cally enhanced virtual world based on images of Schulz’s Drohobych and its environs.

Though we have no way of predicting what future adap-tations of Schulz will look like, it is worthwhile to briefly, using the example of Idol, sketch the two main directions in which the creation of adaptations may advance. In the first of these, the idea is to (re)create language, in the sec-ond, to build a world. Idol – though within a rather mod-est scope – displays features of both.

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Language as World. Digital Adaptation’s Textual InheritanceIdol is the latest grandchild of two paraliterary genres of the 1970s and 1980s. The first of those was the gamebook, the second: the textual adventure game, also called interac-tive fiction. The gamebook, a phenomenon that arose in the 1980s in popular fiction, most often in the genres or featur-ing elements of fantasy and science-fiction, was written not in the form of continuous text, but rather numbered para-graphs, relating to each other without regard for chronol-ogy. The reader could jump around from the beginning of the book to the end and back. This device was not so much based on a fascination with Cortazar’s Hopscotch as the subordination of story to game, since the game aspect was the most important genre determinant in those books. The rules within the instructions to interactive fiction demand-ed that the reader battle monsters, with the outcome decid-ed by a throw of the dice. Another important element was the process of mapping out the dungeons where these bat-tles usually took place, as that enabled players to effectively reach their goal, most often that of finding a treasure-chest. The formula of these games, which were known in Poland under the name “fantasolo,”5 was later used in more liter-ary, less game-oriented forms, for example in Carlo Frabet-ti’s The Palace of 100 Gates (El palacio de las cien puertas).6

On the other hand, the textual adventure game is a genre that sprang to life entirely in the digital realm, its first

5 PolishexamplesofthisgenrewerepublishedinRazem:JacekCiesielski’s“Dreszcz”(Shiver)and“Goblin.”SeeJ.Ciesielski,“Dreszcz,”Razem33-34/1987.

6 C.Frabetti,El palacio de las cien puertas, Madrid 2005.

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instance being William Crowther and Don Wood’s 1977 game “Adventure”. The game was comprised of a series of descriptions of places, through which the player-read-er moved, entering into interactions with the characters and objects who happened to be in a given location. The tool of interaction was not selection of a text segment, but a window of suggestions that the player used to work his or her way through the narrative of the game, with the help of a parser, that is, a computer algorithm capable of understanding such rudimentary suggestions as take key or go west. Whether and how the player would finish the game depended on this dialogue with the parser. For almost two decades, up until the 1990s – when computer games, thanks to improvements in the domain of com-puter graphics, began to resemble films more than liter-ature – purely textual adventure games were one of the main currents in computer entertainment.

In approaching the creative adaptation of Schulz into the digital domain, nowadays sparkling with multimedia fire-works, we were led back to that tradition, minimal in its means and closest to the literary work. Idol, however, is neither a textual adventure game, nor quite 100% a game-book. The work does involve battling monsters (the player must shoot at some minions of Lord de V., with the outcome decided by a dice throw), it features a “treasure-chest” that enables the main part of the game to end with success, and can even boast elements of conversation with (pseudo-)artificial intelligence. Nevertheless, making return trips to the Drohobych town square, where the game begins and

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ends, and starting the game all over again are more import-ant than reaching some arbitrarily chosen destinations. The main purpose of this literary game, played at a rhythm of free, hypertextual exploration of fictional space, is above all testing the narrative potential of digital textual forms. In focusing on a few of them, we do not want to commit to any one in particular, leaving that decision to readers and the creators of future digital Schulz adaptations.

It is worthwhile to remember two forms of adaptation that Idol does not engage in, but to which Schulz’s work might lend itself beautifully. One is the critical hypertext adap-tation, which involves interventions not in the text, but in its presentation, which features a metatextual layer super-imposed on the initial text through the use of digital tools. An example of this would be the digital version of Potocki’s The Saragossa Manuscript (Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie) published by Ha!art in 2012, which allows alternative path-ways to be navigated through the work. The second type, artistic and poetic rather than critical, is the animated text. One can imagine, for example, The Cinnamon Shops present-ed as a series of non-interactive slides, on which quotations from Schulz’s prose are shown, subjected to a procedure along the lines of concrete poetry or liberature. The models for this genre of animated text are Zenon Fajfer’s Ars Poetica (2002) and Eyelids (Powieki, 2013). An adaptation of Ashes and Diamonds (Popiół i diament) was made in this genre in 2014 – Agata Słodownik, Michał Danielewicz, and Michał Szot made a gamebook consisting of mobile, interactive text boards, presenting the work in poetic rather than epic form.

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The World as Text: In Bruno Schulz’s Virtual Spaces The principle most widely followed in computer adap-tations from literature is that of constructing a world based on descriptions, characters and events found in the literary original.7 I have in mind not only the obvi-ous and easy adaptation of ready-made worlds such as J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. The high-budget game industry is not afraid to set the action of its productions in the world of Dante’s Divine Comedy.8 The component of building a world, present in purely linguistic form in textual adventure games, is also visible and important in Idol. The adventure begins in the square and then leads by way of three branches: through a building, down the street of Crocodiles, and into the suburbs to a park, Trin-ity Square and the cinnamon shops, to finally reach the soda water factory, the museum, or by train, the san-atorium. It is essential to keep in mind, however, that Schulz’s bricks, from which this world has been recon-structed, must be filled with content by the reader, not a graphic artist hired for the task. The effect of immer-sion, submersion and exploration of particular locations is heightened by the music composed by Artur Sosen Klimaszewski to complement (rather than illustrating) some spaces. Idol, though unavoidably driven by the lo-gistics of plot, was created using maps. We have to know

7 The relevant theory of possible worlds, according to Marie-Laure Ryan, was popularized in PolandbyAnnaŁebkowska.Inthepastdecade,Ryanhassuccessfullyappliedittodigitalliterature and computer games. See Marie-Laure Ryan, Avatars of Story, Minneapolis 2006. More recently, see: M.J.P. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, Guernsey 2013.

8 Dante’s Inferno, Electronic Arts 2010.

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in what place and at what moment to place a given event, dialogue, or object. Because of this, it is best read with the aid of maps, even if they are only rudimentary pencil sketches.

We are going to continue to move forward in the do-main of text as world, not world as text. The next phase – though it’s hard to say whether it represents a step for-ward – will be adaptation scenarios in the reverse direc-tion, productions with much greater force and Schulz’s Drohobych seen from a perspective not so much second as first person singular, with a camera mounted over the head of the player-explorer as he or she encounters other aficionados of the precipitous imagination behind the Cinnamon Shops. Together with them in this virtual Second Life, rendered by the newest, seamless graphics, he will ride in a horse-drawn carriage, play with buttons by the town square, look for priceless stamps for his own virtual stamp album, or even– shoot from a double-bar-relled shotgun at rebellious mannequins… There are as many possibilities as there are individuals interested in making such visions real. The enormous potential of Schulz’s oeuvre, and the many secrets of his imagination that have not yet been unlocked, assure us that the de-velopment of such digital productions is a question not of “whether,” but of “when.”


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